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EARLY BRITAIN, 

1 

CELTIC BRITAIN 



BY 

J. RHYS, M.A., D.LiTT. (Oxon.). 

Honorary LL.D. (Edin.). 

Honorary D.Litt. (Wales). 

PROFESSOR OF CELTIC IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD ; 

PRINCIPAL OF JESUS COLLEGE, AND LATE FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE : 

FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY. 

WITH TWO MAPS, AND WOODCUTS OF COINSi, 
THIRD EDITION, REVISED. 



PUBLISHED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE GENERAL LITERATURE 

COMMITTEE. 



LONDON: 
SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE, 

NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, W.C. ; 

43, QUEEN VICTORIA STREET, E.C. ; 

BRIGHTON: 129, NORTH STREET. 

New York : EDWIN S. GORHAM. 
1904. 



# 






LOVE AND MALCOMSON, LTD., PRINTERS, 
GREAT QUEEN. STREET, LINCOLN* S-INN FIELDS, 
LONDON, W.C. 



Li ^ 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 



These are the days of little books, and when the 
author was asked to add one to their number, he 
accepted the invitation with the jaunty simplicity of 
an inexperienced hand, thinking that it could not give 
him much trouble to expand or otherwise modify the 
account given of early Britain in larger works ; but 
closer acquaintance with them soon convinced him of 
the folly of such a plan — he had to study the subject 
for himself or leave it alone. In trying to do the 
farmer he probably read enough to have enabled him 
to write a larger work than this ; but he would be 
ashamed to confess how long it has occupied him. 

As a student of language, he is well aware that 
no severer judgment could be passed on his essay 
in writing history than that it should be found to be 
as bad as the etymologies made by historians are 
wont to be ; but so essential is the study of Celtic 
names to the elucidation of the early history of 
Britain that the risk is thought worth incurring. The 
difficulty of writing anything intelligible on the sub- 
ject arises not only from the scarcity of the data 



IV CELTIC BRITAIN. 

handed down by ancient authors, but also in a great 
measure from the absence of the information neces- 
sary to enable one rightly to connect those data with 
one another. Take, for instance, the allusion by 
Ammianus Marcellinus to the VerUiriones as one of 
the nations of the north of Britain : one cannot be 
said to be much the wiser for it, until one happens 
to recognize the regular Goidelic form of their name 
re-emerging as that of the Men of Fortrenn^ who 
play an important part in the history of Alban. 
Identifications of this kind will, it is hoped, do some- 
thing to bring the history of early Britain out of the 
quicksands into which historians' etymologizing has 
helped to steer it, and to make up for the short- 
comings of the work. These will probably be found 
to be of two kinds : the errors into which one 
unaccustomed to write on historical subjects can 
hardly avoid falling ; and the crudities of certain 
theories which further research may show to be 
untenable. For it is unavoidable that much of the 
reasoning should be of a highly hypothetical nature, 
of which the reader will in due time be reminded 
by the changes rung on such hard-driven words as 
appears and seems ^ as probably, possibly, and perhaps. 

Two or three words may here be appended as to 
some of the authorities cited, with which the general 
reader may not be very familiar. For the writings of 



PREFACE. V 

Gildas the references are to those published by Haddan 
and Stubbs, in the first volume of their work, entitled 
" Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents relating to 
Great Britain and Ireland " : those learned authors 
regarded Gildas as having written no later than 547 
or 550. Great liberty has been taken with Nennius 
in these pages as a number of tracts of various dates 
and origins are more or less loosely associated with him; 
but the author is happy to be now able to refer to 
an account of the whole group in a recently published 
work by M. Arthur de la Borderie (Paris and London, 
1883), a small volume which may be recommended as 
a model of clearness and precision calculated to dispel 
much of the haze floating round the name of Nennius. 
What has been here sometimes called the Welbh 
Chronicle is also kno<vn by the fancy name of Amia/es 
Cavibria^ under which it was published in i860 for 
the Master of the Rolls, from three manuscripts : the 
oldest of them appears to end wiih the year 954, 
while one of the other two brings the entries down 
to 1288. They are written in Latin, and the author 
takes the liberty of stating that he has heard no less 
an authority than Mr. Freeman speak of them in 
comparatively strong terms of praise. To avoid 
unnecessary misunderstanding from another source 
it is ri^ht to add that one and the same Irish manu- 
script has carelessly been cited in this volume, some- 



VI CELTIC BRITAIN. 

times by its native name of Lebar na h-Uidre^ and 
sometimes by the translated one of the Book of the 
Dun. It was publishd in lithographed facsimile 
by the Royal Irish Academy (Dublin, T870); and it 
derives its name from the story, that the original, of 
which the existing manuscript is a fragmentary copy, 
was written by St. Ciaran on the skin of a favourite 
dun cow, which, when he escaped from his father's 
house to enter a monastery, spontaneously followed 
him, and faithfully served him for many years. The 
copy dates about the end of the eleventh century, 
since it is on sad record that the transcriber was 
murdered by a party of robbers in the stone church 
of Clonmacnois in the year 1106. Lastly, mention 
must here be made of a work of capital importance, 
which came into the market just as these sheets had 
passed through the press, to wit, Vigfusson and 
Powell's Corpus Poeticum Boreale (Oxford, 1883) : 
the Norse text and the rendering of the same into 
English, together with the mine of rare learning in 
the numerous notes and excursuses appended, will 
be found to be interesting fir,st and foremost, it is 
true, to the student of literature and of civilization 
generally ; but they are scarcely less so to writers 
on history, not only when they undertake to describe 
the doings of the Wickings in Alban and the islands 
adjacent, but also when they would grapple with the 



PREFACE. Vll 

much harder task of trying to give a full and satis- 
factory answer to the difficult question, what manner of 
men the Norsemen found there. 

Moreover, he has accepted and employed the 
theory advanced by ethnologists, that the early 
inhabitants of this country were of Iberian origin ; 
and he hopes to take an early opportunity of 
writing on the glottological aspect of that question ; 
also of explaining more in detail why he has changed 
his opinion as to the classification of the Celtic 
nations. Then to come to a matter of spelling, it 
has been attempted throughout to present the early 
Celtic names in their native form rather than in a.. 
Latinised one ; but with regard to the later names he 
would be greatly surprised to find that he had suc- 
ceeded in being consistent, as it is by no means 
easy to choose from the variety of spellings used at 
different times, or even in different manuscripts of 
the same age. 

Lastly, the author has great pleasure in thanking 
many kind and learned friends for valuable suggestions 
and corrections. He \yould mention them by name but 
that he is loth to risk the danger of their being in a 
manner held sponsors for opinions not theirs, 

J. RHYS. 

Oxford, January, 1884. 



PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. 

It is with a feeling of mingled pleasure and sadness 
that I pen this word of preface, pleasure to find that 
a third edition is urgently called for, and sadness to 
think how many good and helpful friends I have lost 
since this little book was first published twenty-two 
years ago. But the unobserved lapse of time has 
brought a measure of compensation in the appearance 
of a number of books which have proved very useful to 
me, such as Professor Zimm.er's *' Nennius Vindi- 
■catus," and the varied help which it elicited from 
other scholars to a more exact appreciation of the 
writings commonly associated with the name uf 
Nennius. The woik done in that direction may be 
regarded as appropriately crowned by the publication 
of Mommsen's exhaustive edition of Gildas and 
Nennius in the " Monumenta Germaniae Historica." 
It would take up too much room to enumerate here 
the other important works which have appeared in 
the interval, but references to them will be found in 
-tiifcir proper places in the following chapters. 

The reader who has ihe curiosity to compare the 
present edition with the previous ones will find that 
it has been revised throughout. It is hoped that he 
will feel that the numerous changes made are for the 
better; that some crude theories have been made 
less crude, and that some others have rightly been, so 
to say, turned inside out. At the same time it has 
been the endeavour of everybody concerned to alter 
the form of the whole as little as possible. 

J. RHYS. 
Jesus College, Oxford, 

Odobcr^ 1904. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS C^SAR. 



Pa^e I 



"t> 



2 

5 

7 

9 

13 



Preliminary Remarks 

Names of the Celts and their classification 

Pytheas and his visits to Britain 

Posidonius visiting it 

Caesar's first expedition to Britain 

His second expedition 

Britain after Caesar's departure. Early coins, copper 
and bronze, iron ... i8 

Inscribed coins and the tribes of southern Britain, Com- 
mies and his Sons 21 

Coins of Tasciovant, Cuncbelinos, and others. Policy of 
the Catuvellauni 26 

The Eceni : the situation of some of the tribes : Com- 
mios and the Catuvellauni 28 



CHAPTER H. 

BRITAIN DOWN TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 
A'lusions to Britain in the works of ancient authors ... 32 
Coins cf the Dobunni and other Western Tribes ... 35 

The policy of the Eceni 36 

The Cornavii, the Coritani, the Brigantes, the Parisi and 

their coins .„ 38 



X CELTIC BRITAIN. 

The tribes that used coins, and those that did not. Trade 
routes, the exportation of tin Page 41 

No evidence of direct trade between Cornwall and the 
Continent. The Carthaginians, the Veneti and 
their marine ... ••• 47 

The population of Britain, the growing of corn, tattoo- 
ing, polyandry •• 52 

Political state of the Brythons mostly like that of the 
Gauls 57 

Kings of the old type disappearing among the Brythons 61 

Kings by divine right among the Goidels compared with 
those of Greece in the Heroic Age 63 

Aryan polytheism of the Celts in Britain. Druidism 
derived from the Aborigines 67 

The Druidic tonsure 74 



CHAPTER III. 

THE ROMANS IN BRITAIN, AND HOW THEY LEFT IT. 
The conquest of the island by Aulus Plautim ... ... 76 

Ostorius operating against the Eceni, Deceangli, and 

Brigantes ,80 

Oitorius's engagement with the Silures, and the defeat 

of Caratacos ... ... 81 

Suetonius Paulinus reaching Mona, and Tacitus's ac- 
count of the Druids ... 83 

The revolt of the Eceni 84 

Britain under Vespasian's great generals, Petilius 

Cerealis, Julius Frontinus, and Julius Agricola ... 85 

Britain down to the death of Severus in 211 90 

Britain independent under Carausius and Allectus. Re- 
joined to the empire by Constantius Chlorus in 296, 
cleared of invaders by Theodosius in 369... ... 93 



CONTENTS. XI 

Maximus taking the troops from Britain in 387. Con- 
stantine doing the same in 407. The Roman ofBcials 
driven out in 410 Page 95 

Britain, Upper and Lower. Administration of the pro- 
vince by the Romans 97 

Christianity and Latin in Britain : military character of 
the province ••• toi 

The province, after the Romans left, governed by native 
successors of the Dux Britanniarum and Comes 
Litoris Saxonici 102 

Lower Britain under Aurelius Arabrosius 104 

The rise of English States in Lower Britain 105 

Summary of the dealings of the West Saxons with the 
Celtic inhabitants down to the time of ^thelstan ... 107 

What became of the Celts of Lower Britain no 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE KYMRY. 
The peoples of Upper Britain, the rise of English states 

in the same .,112 

The jurisdiction of the Dux Britanniarum marking the 

limits of the State of (he Kymry 116 

The Latin Dux becoming the Welsh GwUdig : Cunedda 

the first Gwledig it8 

The rule of Cunedda and h's Sons 120 

The princes of Upper Britain in the time of Gildas ... 122 

The legend how Maelgwn acquired his power 124 

Maelgwn's successors, and the battle of Chester 126 

Wars of the Kymry with Edwin and his successors ... 129 
The Gwledig, sometimes called dragon., and the English 

term Bretwalda related... 135 



X:i CELTIC BRITAIN. 

The contests with the Angles as pictured in Welsh lite- 
rature. The name Kymro Page 139 

The land of the Kymry severed into Wales and Cumbria : 

English encroachments on the former 141 

Summary of the history of Wales down to 1090 [42 

Cambria and Cumbria, (orms oi oriQ mme ... ... r44 

Summary of the history of Cumbria 146 



CHAPTER V. 

THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 

The Picts of Galloway 150 

The Picts of Lothian .. . ... ... 15c 

Rema.rks on Manaw a.nd Galloway ... ... [54 

The Dalriad Scots in Britain ... 156 

1 he Picts beyond the Forth 160 

The Pictibh kingdom not Celtic in itsorigin. The relative 

position of the chief peoples of the North 162 

The growth of the power of the Maeatae and other Picts.. 166 
The Picts from the time of Brude mac Maelchon to the 

ecclesiastical revolution under Nechtan 171 

Nechtan and his competitors for power : the Brython 

Ungust overcoming the rest ... ■■■ i75 

The Brythcns of Fortrenn mostly in power till their 

defeat by the Danes in 839 179 

Kenneth mac Alpin establishing the power of the Goidels 182 
Kenneth's successors down to the year 900 : the kingdom 

beginning to be called Alban 184 

Summary of the history of Alban till the death of 

Kenneth's last male descendant in 1034 187 



CONTENTS Xlll 

Duncan and Macbeth Page 190 

Macbeth not so much a usurper as leader of the Picts in 

their effort to reassert their power 192 

The spread of the GoideHc Language in Alban under the 

Kenneth dynasty 197 

The rise of Feudalism in the North 200 

The capacity of the Goidel and of the Pict for political 

organisation 201 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE ETHNOLOGY OF EARLY BRITAIN. 

The name Albion 204 

The spelling and history of the names, Britain, Britannia, 

&c 207 

Onginal meaning oi Britanni, Brittones, &c 211 

Classification of the Celtic nations based on Celtic phono- 
logy 215 

The parts of Britain which were Brythonic and Goidelic 

respectively .. ... ... 218 

The same enumeration continued, with indications of 

traces of the earlier inhabitants 221 

The situation of the various tribes of the North 224 

Piolemy's account of Britain : the position of the Caledo- 
nian Forest 226 

Celtic proper names with p in Early Britain either Bry- 
thonic or non-Celtic 228 

Other distinctions of a similar nature 231 

The treatment of cs or x supplying another probable test 233 
The topography of Britain affected by the legends about 
Arthur and Finn respectively 236 



Xiv CELTIC BRITAIN. 

CHAPTER VII. 

THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN CONTINUED. 

Probable history of the term Picti, and some of its 

equivalents ... Page 240 

The name Scoff/ 243 

The Goidels of Britain partly invaders from Ireland : re- 
marks on the ancient sepulchral monuments of Wales 247 
The distribution of early Goidelic inscriptions in Wales 255 

The Brythons probably buried in barrows 261 

Some Goidelic names non-Aryan in point of origin or 

of formula .,. 263 

The language of the non-Celtic Aborigines spoken in 

historical times in Britain 271 

Race characteristics more persistent than language ... 277 



APPENDIX. 
Additional notes on some of the names in the text ,. 279 



INDEX 327 



MAPS, &c. 

A coloured map of Britain, showing the relative positions of 
its chief peoples during the Roman occupation. 

Piolemy's "British Isle?," 

Strabo's " Western Europe." 

Wales in deaneries of the time of Henry VIII. 

A plate with engravings of five coins, preceded by a brief 
letterpress description of each, pp. xv., xvi. 



CELTIC BRITAIN. XV 

THE COINS. 

(See p, xvi.) 



No. I represents a gold stater of Philip II. of Macedon, with 
the wreathed bust of Apollo on the obverse, and a 
charioteer in a biga on the reverse : underneath is the 
name of Philip, f'lAinnoT. 

No. 2 is an early British imitation of the stater : the coin is 
in Sir John Evans's collection, but the place of finding is 
unknown. Among other things it will be noticed that it 
has been attempted to make the charioteer into a winged 
figure of Victory, and that the two horses have been 
converted into one horse with eight legs. 

No. 3 is also in Sir J. Evans's collection, and was found at 
Leighton Buzzard in 1849. Besides that the faces look 
the other way, it will be noticed that the place occupied 
by Philip's name on the original is in this instance 
devoted to a kind of ornamentation, which at a distance 
has somewhat the appearance of letters. 

No. 4 is a coin of Addidomaros, a part of whose name is to 
be read Ae9||D on the reverse. On the obverse the face 
has given way to the coiffure which has developed into 
a sort of cross. 

No. 5 is a coin of the Parisi, and it is to be seen at the York 
Museum. The obverse is taken up by the coiffure, so 
that it shows no part of the face. The reverse repre- 
sents a very peculiar horse, accompanied by the legend 
VEP CORF. 



4- 




(See p. XV.) 




A MTATP ®F 

WALES 

AS IT WAS IN DEANERIES 
irutke tLme of Henry "V3II. 



oriRon.: PuhTzshed^ l>y t7i« Socieby for- J^romoting Chj-istum- 15iowLa3.g& 



CELTIC BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER I. 

BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS C^SAR. 

The Celts form, in point of speech, a brancli of 
the great group of nations which has been 
variously called Aryan, Indo-European, Indo- 
Germanic, Indo-Celtic, and Japhetic, while the other 
branches are represented by the Italians, the 
Greeks, the Teutons, the Litu-Slaves, the Armenians, 
the Persians, and the chief peoples of Hindustan. 
The respective places of these nations in the geo- 
graphy of the Old World give, roughly speaking, a 
very fair idea of their relative nearness to one another 
as to language. Thus the gulf is widest between the 
Celtic languages and Sanskrit or Zend, and narrowest 
between Celtic and Latin, while it is comparatively 
narrow between the Celtic and Teutonic languages, 
among which is included English, the speech destined 
in time to supersede the still living idioms of the 
insular Celt. Now the Celts of antiquity who 
appeared first and oftenest in history were those of 
Gallia, which, having been modified by the French 
into Gaule, we term Gaul. It included the France 
and Switzerland of the present day, and much 
territory besides. This people had various names. 



2 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

One of them was Gallic which in their language 
meant warriors or brave men, and seems to have 
been always used by the Romans to designate them \ 
but some of the Gauls in Ccesar's time preferred the 
name which he wrote CeltcB. This may have been 
synonymous with the other, and so it would appear 
to have meant warriors, its origin, if Aryan, being 
probably the same as that of the Old Norse hild-r, 
war, battle \ but the word would admit of being 
explained as originally of the same meaning as 
Britlones^ of which w^e shall have to speak later. 
Recent writers, however, are of opinion that the 
terms Galli and Celtae argue an ancient distinc- 
tion of race ; that the latter at first applied exclu- 
sively to the aborigines who were non-Aryans, while 
Gaulish tribes only came in as the Aryan invaders of 
their country ; and that these races only became 
one nation by a long process of amalgamation. As 
might be expected, ancient authors commonly mix 
up the I wo names, and from that of the Celtae of 
yore modern wTiters have derived the terms Celt and 
Celtic, which are employed in speaking of the family 
in its widest sense. This would be a further exten- 
sion of the meaning of the old word, as Britain was 
considered to be outside the Celtic world. It was 
an island beyond Celtica, or over against it, as the 
ancients were wont to say. 

It is a long time ago since the first Celts crossed 
the sea to settle in Britain. Nobody knows how 
long, but we should probably not be wrong in 
supposing it to have been more than a millennium 
before the Christian era. And when they did 



BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS C^SAR. 3 

come the immigration was not all over in one year or 
even in one century. The invasions may, further, be 
regarded as made by peoples belonging to both 
branches of the Celtic family. For as the Teutonic 
nations divide themselves into High Dutch, Nether 
Dutch, and Scandinavians, so the Celtic family, as 
far back as we can trace it into the darkness of anti- 
quity, consisted of two groups or branches with lin- 
guistic features of their own which marked them off 
from one another. To the one belonged the ancestors 
of the people who speak Gaelic in Ireland, the Isle 
of Man, and the Highlands of the North, a language 
which existed also in Wales and Devon in the sixth 
century, and probably later. The national name which 
the members of this group have always given them- 
selves, so far as one knows, is that of Gaoidhel, pro- 
nounced and spelt in English Gael, but formerly 
written by themselves Goidel. So, as there is a 
tendency in this country to understand by the word 
Gael the Gael of the North alone, we shall speak of 
the group generally as Goidels and Goidelic. The 
other group is represented in point of speech by 
the people of Wales and the Bretons; formerly 
one might have added the Welsh of Cumbria, and till 
the 1 8th century some of those of Cornwall. The 
national name of those speaking these dialects came 
sooner or later to be that of Briton ; but, since that 
word has no precise meaning, we take the Welsh form 
of it which is Brythoit, and call this group Brythons 
and Brythonic, whenever it may be needful to be 
exact. The ancient Gauls must also be classified 
with them, since the Brythons may be regarded as Gauls 

B 2 



4 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

who came over to settle in Britain Moreover, the 
language of most of the country south of the Forth, 
where English now prevails, probably differed little 
at the time of the Roman conquest from that of the 
Gauls of the Continent. This form of Celtic after- 
wards spread itself by degrees among the Goidels in 
the west of the island ; so that the later Brythons there 
cannot be regarded as wholly Brythons in point of 
blood, a very considerable proportion of them being 
probably Goidels using the language of the other 
Celts. The Brythons formed the first group of 
Gaulish invasions and they appear to have settled 
here before the middle of the fourth century B.C., 
for Pytheas, to whom we are coming, gives indirect 
evidence to their presence.^ The next group of Gaulish 
invasions was that of the Belgae, which was recent 
in Caesar's time. As the language of the Belgae was 
not essentially different from Brythonic, their name 
and individuality seem to have been eventually lost 
in those of the Brythonic element. The Goidels were 
undoubtedly the first Celts to come to Britain, as 
their geographical position to the west and north of 
the others w^ould indicate, as well as the fact that 
traces of them are difficult to discover on the Con- 
tinent. They had probably been in the island for 
centuries when the Brythons came and drove them 
westward. The Goidels, it is right to say, had done 
the same with another people, for there is no reason 
to suppose that when they came here they found the 
country without inhabitants. Thus we get at least four 

^ Sei Ch. H. Read's " Guide to the Bronze Age Antiquities 
in the British Museum" (London, 1904) p. 22. 



BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS CESAR. 5 

peoples to deal with — three Celtic and one pre-Celtic ; 
and a great difficulty in writing the history of early 
Britain arises from the circumstance that the ancient 
authors, on whom we have to rely for our information, 
never troubled themselves to make nice distinctions 
between these races, though they were probably in dif- 
ferent stages of civilization. We shall, therefore, pro- 
ceed at once to give the substance of what they have 
put on record respecting this country,. and make what 
use we can of ancient coins or other relics of the 
past to supplement that information about the island, 
seizing as we go on every opportunity of distinguishing 
between the different races peopling it. When the 
reader has thus become acquainted with the leading 
facts, something will be added by way of a more 
detailed account of our ethnology. 

No such islands as Britain and Ireland were known 
to Herodotus in the fifth century before the Christian 
era ; but some time afterwards one of the Scipios of 
Rome visited Marseilles^ and Narbonne to find out 
whether trade could not be established with the 
region beyond Southern Gaul, so as to injure the 
Carthaginians, whose sailors used to bring tin, not 
only from Spain and certain tin-producmg islands off 
the north-west of that penmsula, but also from 
Gaul. The Roman could not, however, get any 
information about the north, but the idea of a voyage 
of discovery took form among the merchants of 
Marseilles, and the result was, that they fitted out an 
expedition accompanied by an eminent mathemati- 
cian of that city, with whose name the reader should 
' Strabo, A, 2, i (C. 19c), 



6 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

be familiar as that of one of the most intrepid ex- 
plorers the world has seen. This was Pytheas,i 
who lived in the time of Alexander the Great and 
Aristotle, the latter of whom died in the year 
322 B.C., while the year 330 is guessed as the date 
of the floruit of Pytheas. The publication of the 
history of his travels is supposed to have taken place 
soon after the death of Aristotle; and fragments of the 
diary of his voyage have been preserved to us. in the 
works of various ancient authors. Pytheas sailed round 
Spain to Brittany, and thence to Kent and other 
parts of Britain ; next he set out from the Thames 
to the mouth of the Rhine, and thence he rounded 
Jutland, proceeding east so far as the mouth of the 
Vistula-: he turned back from there and possibly 
coasted Norway. Finally he returned to Britain and 
sailed thence to Brittany, whence he reached the mouth 
of the Garonne, and he found a route over land to 
Marseilles. Thus Pytheas was in Britain twice, 
and paid more attention to it than to any of the 
other countries he visited ; but he does not seem 
to have been as far as the tin districts in the west, and 
it is remarkable that he gives no hint which would 
lead one to suppose that there was any communication 
between them and the Continent. That intercourse, 
as we are left to suppose, was confined to the south- 
east of the island, where the Channel was narrowest. 
Pytheas took a great many observations in Britain ; 
but owing to the nature of the instruments which 

^ For a fuller account of Pytheas see Elton's " Origins of 
Eng. Hist." (London, 1882), pp. 13-40, and the extracts at the 
end of that volume. 



BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS CESAR. '7 

were then in use, they are of no value. It is quite 
otherwise with regard to what he says of the in- 
habitants : he saw plenty of corn in the fields in the 
South-east, and he noticed that the farmers gathered 
the sheaves into large barns, in which the threshing 
was done. They had so little sun that the open 
threshing-floors of the brighter south would not have 
done in a land of clouds and rain like Britain. He 
hkewise found that they made a drink ^ by mixing 
wheat and honey, which is the mead still known in 
certain parts of Wales ; and he is supposed to have 
been the authority for their use of another drink, 
which Greek writers^ speak of as made of barley and 
used instead of wine. The name by which it was 
known to them is still the Celtic word for beer ; it 
was formerly curini^ and it now makes cuirm in Irish, 
and cwrw in Welsh. Thus we have ample evidence 
that in the fourth century before our era the Aryan 
farmer had made himself thoroughly at home in 
Britain. Now the expedition of Pytheas had been 
got up for practical purposes by his fellow-citizens, 
the Greeks of Marseilles, and it resulted undoubtedly 
in the extension across Gaul of their trade, directly or 
indirectly, to the corner of Britain nearest to the 
Continent. Some light, it may be added, is shed on 
this by the fact that the first coins supposed to have 
been struck in the island, though that happened long 
after Pytheas's time, were all modelled after Greek 

1 Strabo, A, 5, 5 (C. 201). 

^ Among others, Athenaeus and Dioscoide^ ; see Diefc bach's 
*'Origines Europaepe," s. v, cervesig^. 



8 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

coins made during his time. This points to a trade 
then opened with the north.i 

Some tv/o centuries later another Gieek of note 
extended his travels to the island and visited 
Belerion,^ as he called the district in Cornwall where 
tin was found. This was Posidonius, with whom 
Cicero studied at Rhodes. Besides his description 
of the people and their method of working the tin, 
Posidonius is supposed to have been the authority of 
Diodorus Siculus^ for stating that the inhabitants of 
Britain lived in mean dwellings made for the most 
part of reeds or wood, and that harvest with them 
meant cutting the ears of corn off and storing them 
in pits underground, whence what had been longest 
in keeping was fetched day by day to be dressed 
for food. This appears to have been a way 
of preparing the cereal which was well under- 
stood in the i8th century in the Western Islands 
of Scotland, where one proceeded so skilfully to 
prepare the corn with the aid of a flame, that it 
might be dressed, winnowed, ground, and baked 
within an hour after reaping."* Posidonius would 
seem to have been speaking of a part of the country 
more remote than the south-east corner, to which the 
words of Pytheas probably applied. But we have 

^ See Evans's "Coins of the Ancient Britons," p. 24. 

^ Diod. Siculus's " Bibliotheca Historica," v, 21, 22. 

3 "Bibl. Hist.," V. 21, 22. 

* See Elton's "Origins of Eng. Hist.," p. 33, where he 
quotes from Martin's "Description of the Western Islands of 
Scotland," published in 1703, a passage illustrative of this 
practice. See also, with regard to Ireland, Tylor's "Primitive 
Culture" (2nd ed.), i. pp. 44, 45, 



BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS CTESA^. 9 

now come down to a time when the Romans began to 
acquaint themselves with the island in a very tangible 
fashion. 

Late in the summer of the year 55 B.C., Julius 
Caesar resolved to cross over to Britain,^ from which 
he understood the Gauls to have had repeated help in 
their wars with him. The season for waging war was, 
it is true, nearly over for that year, but he thought 
it desirable to visit the island, to see the people, and 
ascertain, so to say, how the land lay before h'm. So he 
tried first to extract information from traders about the 
size of the island, and the kind of people that lived 
there, together with their mode of warfare and manner 
of life ; also as to what harbours they had for a number 
of ships of the larger size ; but it was all in vain, and 
he says that no one but merchants readily crossed over, 
and that they only knew the coast and the districts 
opposite Gaul. He therefore sent Volusenus, one of his 
officers, out in a war-ship, to get as much information 
as possible respecting the coast of Britain, whence 
he was to return as soon as he could. In the mean- 
time Caesar collected vessels from all parts, together 
with the fleet which had been engaged the summer 
before against the Veneti, to a port in the country of 
the Morini, from which the passage to Britain could 
be most readily made. News of this had been at 
once carried across, an i ambassadors from many 
of the states in the island came to Caesar, which 
shows that there was a much readier and more inti- 
mate communication between it and Gaul than Caesar's 
words would have led one to anticipate. The ambas- 
1 C£?5ar, "De Bello Gallico," iv. 20-38. 



lO CELTIC BRITAIN. 

sadors promised him hostages, and the submission of 
their states to the Roman people. Caesar, after making 
hberal promises and exhoriing them to continue of 
that mind, sent them home, accompanied by Com- 
mios. This man was one of the Atrebates, whom 
Csesar had made king over that Belgic people when 
they were conquered by the legions, and his rule was 
afterwards extended to the Morini. Commios was 
chosen for his supposed fidelity to Roman interests, 
and because he had great influence in the south of 
Britain, where a portion of the people of the Atrebates 
had settlement''. He had also, in Caesar's opinion, 
proved himself a man of valour and prudence. His 
orders were to visit as many states as possible, and to 
exhort them to embrace the alliance of the Roman 
people ; but no sooner had Commios landed, and his 
business become known, than he was placed in bonds. 
On the return of Volusenus with such information as 
a man who had not ventured to land was able to pro- 
cure, Caesar embarked at midnight on the 24th of August 
or one of the two succeeding days, with two legions 
or about 12,000 men, in about eighty ships, together 
with a number of galleys, leaving eighteen ships, de- 
tained at a neighbouring port by a contrary wind : these 
were to follow with the cavalry as soon as they could. 
Caesar reached the British shore betimes in the morn- 
ing ; but, finding the point touched an unfavourable 
place to land in the face of the enemy that mustered 
in force on the cliffs around, he coasted about seven 
Roman miles to a spot where there was an open 
beach and a level strand. The native cavalry and 
charioteers, closely followed by the rest of the British 



BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS C/ESAR. 11 

forces, were there in time to contest the landing of 
the legions. A severe engagement followed, in which 
the Roman soldiers showed considerable hesitation, 
and were thrown into much confusion by the British 
charioteers, with whose movements they were not 
familiar. Gradually, however, as the Roman soldiers 
got a firm footing, they forced the natives to retreat ; 
and C^sar bewails the al)sence of his cavalry, which 
he required to complete his victory. Afterwards 
ambassadors came to him to sue for peace, with Com- 
mios, released from bonds, at their head. They laid 
the war to the charge of the multitude, and begged 
Ceesar to forgive those who knew no better : he met 
this with the truly Roman complaint, that, after they 
had sent ambassadors of their own free will to him 
on the Continent, they had attacked him without 
cause ; but he granted their request with a demand 
for hostages. Some were given on the spot, and 
others were to come from a distance in a (tw days, 
while the leading men surrendered themselves and 
began to send their troops home. 

While this was going on, the eighteen ships bringing 
the cavalry across appeared, -when such a storm arose 
that they were all forced in the face of night to turn 
back to the harbour they had left, after some of them 
had had a narrow escape from being wrecked on the 
coast west of Cesar's camp. Moreover, as it was full 
moon, there followed such a tide that the tempest filled 
with water the war- galleys which had been drawn 
up on shore, and dashed together the transport ships 
that lay at anchor, so that many were wrecked or 
made unfit for immediate use. By dint of hard work 



12 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

and by means of the timber and the bronze of the 
vessels that had been wrecked, Caesar was able to 
get all but twelve passably refitted, while he sent to 
Gaul for the things that were wanting. As soon as the 
British chiefs saw what had happened to the Roman 
cavalry and to the ships, and when they had reckoned 
by the size of the camp how few soldiers it con- 
tained, they began to combme and secretly to muster 
their forces again, as well as to stop sending in 
hostages, hoping, as Caesar thought, that they could 
prolong the war into the winter, and thereby cut 
off his whole army, as a caution to all future in- 
vaders. Their first move was to post cavalry and 
chariots in good positions near the spot where alone 
there was corn still standing, to which the Romans 
must come. In due time one of the legions came, 
and as soon as the men had set to work in the 
fields a well-directed onslaught was made on them, 
and it would have gone hard with the legion, as 
it was attacked on all sides, had not C^sar, who 
was on the alert, brought them aid. The attack 
then ceased, but he was only able to conduct a 
retreat. Then bad weather is said by him to 
have kept both sides quitt for several days, during 
which the British forces seem to have received 
reinforcements. They now advanced to Caesar's 
camp, which was by this time provided with thirty 
horses which Commios had brought over : a battle 
ensued, in which the Romans prevailed and slew a 
considerable number of the enemy in their retreat. 
After the soldiers had duly laid waste the country 
around, {?nd destroyed everything they could, am» 



BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS C^SAR. 1$ 

bassadors came the same day to sue again for 
peace : it was readily granted, but Caesar asked 
for twice the number of hostages demanded the 
time before ; for the general was getting impatient to 
return to Gaul, the reason assigned being the lateness 
of the season and the frail nature of his ships. 
He had probably seen that he could not do much in 
the island without a larger force, especially of cavalry. 
He left shortly before the equinox, so that he had 
been here nearly a month according to some calcu- 
lations, or a little over a fortnight according to others, 
but without having been able to advance a mile fiom 
the place of landing. The hostages were to be sent 
after him, and those of two states reached him, but 
no more. Nevertheless, the Roman Senate, on learn- 
ing by letter from him what he had achieved, thought 
it right to decree twenty days of public thanksgiving. 

Ctesar^ gave orders that more ships and those of a 
more suitable kind should be got ready for the ensuing 
summer for a second campaign in Britain ; and such 
was the eagerness with which the soldiers went to 
work, that by the time he returned in June from 
Illyricum and Italy, they had got nearly 600, new 
and old, almost ready to be launched. Thus it would 
appear that what they had seen of the island had 
filled them with thoughts of valuable plunder : the 
same feeling is proved also by the privateers, which 
those who were able fitted out to accompany the 
army across the Channel. Among other things it 
was thought that British waters would be found to 
produce abundance of precious pearls, an idea got 
1 "Bell. Gall.," V. 1-23. 



14 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

rid of, no doubt, in time, though we read of British 
pearls adorning a corselet which Caesar was pleased 
to dedicate in the temple of the Goddess of Victory 
at Rome. When all was ready he embarked at 
a place he calls Fortiis Itius^ or the Ictian port, 
which was probably the harbour whence he had 
sailed before, with five legions and 2,000 cavalry : 
the number of vessels of all kinds was over 800, 
though 60 built on the Marne, in the country of 
the Meldi above the Parisii, had failed to join the 
expedition, owing to a storm which drove them back. 
This year Caesar was resolved to begin in season : 
accordingly he set sail, as it is supposed, late on the 
18th of July or, according to others, a day or two 
later, but by da} break he found his fleet carried by 
the current past the South Foreland, and it was 
with great labour that he got back to the spot which 
he had ascertained the summer before to be the 
best place for landing : this work, together with the 
choice of a site for the camp, took up the rest of 
the day. During the night, however, he set out with 
all the army, except what force he thought needful 
to leave in charge of the camp and the ships moored 
near it, in quest of the enemy that had this time 
thought it of no use to contest the landing of 
such a force, but rather to take up an advantageous 
position inland. Caesar, after marching about twelve 
miles in the night, came in sight of the Britons, and 
soon found them advancing to attack his men from 
a higher ground. On being repulsed by the Roman 
cavalry they withdrew into a place excellently fortified 
by nature and art, with all its entrances blocked up 



BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS CAESAR. 1 5 

with felled trees : it appeared to have been made 
during one of their civil wars. The legions made 
themselves in due time masters of it, but Ccesar 
did not venture to pursue the enemy far that 
day. Next morning, as he was sending cavalry 
and infantry after the retreating Britons, news arrived 
from the coast that nearly all his ships had been 
dashed to pieces on the shore during the night. He 
called back his men and marched to the coast, where 
he found that about forty ships had been wrecked, 
but that the rest might be repaired with great labour : 
this was done, and they were hauled on shore to be 
included within the lines of the camp. About ten 
days were taken up by this work, during which word 
was sent to Caesar's lieutenant in Gaul to have as 
many ships as possible got ready and sent over. 
When at length the general returns to seek the 
enemy, he finds him mustering in much greater force 
under the command now of a single leader named 
Cassivellaunos, whose country lay north of the 
Thames, being in all probabiHty that of the people 
called Catuvellauni. This prince, though he had in 
previous years been at constant war with the other 
states, had now the sole command given him by the 
consent of all, whence it would seem that they 
acknowledged him to have been their ablest and 
most tried general. What gave Caesar most trouble 
would seem to have been the quick and sudden move- 
ments of the British cavalry and charioteers, who 
fought bravely with the Roman cavalry ; they were as 
dangerous when retreating as when advancing, for 
when they got the cavalry of the Roman army away 



1 6 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

from it, the combatants alighted and fought as foot 
soldiers. On one occasion the charioteers rushed 
upon the Roman soldiers, when they were engaged 
in fortifying their position, and fought so strenuously 
with the outposts before the camp, that the first 
cohorts of two different legions had to be called out j 
but when they had taken their places with small 
spaces between them they were terrified by the 
enemy's charioteers, who dashed through their midst 
in safety and with the utmost boldness. It was only 
after one of the military tribunes had been killed, and 
more cohorts had come forth, that the enemy re- 
treated. They never fought in close order, but they 
arranged outlying detachments that harassed the 
legions in relays. The next day no less than three 
legions were sent out together for the purpose of 
foraging; but, owing to the Roman cavalry being then 
better backed than before by the infantry, severe 
losses were inflicted on the skirmishers : the British 
auxiliaries, who had mustered in great number, 
straightway withdrew; nor did Cassivellaunos after 
that day hazard a battle on a large scale. Consequently 
Caesar marched towards his territory and crossed the 
Thames, somewhere above London with great diffi- 
culty, but with much alacrity on the part of the 
soldiers, who had as yet had little chance of getting 
much booty. Cassivellaunos sent away most of his 
forces, but retained about 4,000 charioteers to harass 
Caesar's march and to clear the country where he 
was likely to come : his tactics greatly narrowed the 
Roman area of devastation, and made the business 
of burning and destroying much more laborious than 



BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS C^SAR. 1 7 

the soldiers could have wished ; so their general 
speaks almost pathetically of their being only able 
to effect their purpose in the midst of the toils of 
marching. 

This was, however, not to last long ; for the power- 
ful people of the Trinovantes, who inhabited the 
modern county of Essex and a part of Middlesex, 
from beyond the Lea to the Stour, sent in the 
meantime to Caesar to ask for peace, a course which 
they were led to take, partly, no doubt, to escape the 
ravages of the Roman army, and partly perhaps to 
avenge themselves on Cassivellaunos, who had killed 
their king. The son of the latter, who was called 
Mandubratios, had succeeded in making his way to 
Caesar in Gaul, and in securing his protection ; the 
Trinovantes, therefore, not only asked Caesar to 
accept their submission, but also to send Mandu- 
bratios to rule over them, and to save that prince 
from Cassivellaunos. Caesar complied, and demanded 
forty hostages from them, together with corn for the 
army : they brought both, and their territory was pro- 
tected from the soldiery. The work of conquest was 
now easy; for the example of the Trinovantes was 
followed by other tribes — namely^ the Cenimagni, 
Segontiaci, Ancalites, Bibroci, and Cassi, while the 
invader was told that the stronghold of Cassivel- 
launos was not far off, where he would find a large 
number of men and cattle brought together. This 
he discovered to have been admirably fortified by 
nature and art, which latter in Britain consisted in 
making a defence of wood, with a rampart and trench 
drawn round it. But it was not long before the 

c 



1 8 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

Roman soldiers got possession of the place, together 
with the large number of cattle it contained, while 
many of the men were cut down in their flight. But 
Cassivellaunos was not inactive either, and while these 
things were going on in his own territory, he ordered the 
four kings of Cantion, or Kent, together with a part 
of Surrey, to storm Csesar'n camp by the sea, a thing 
which they at once proceeded to do ; but they were 
driven back with considerable loss, one of the 
leaders being captured by the Roman soldiers. At 
the news of this failure, and especially of the defec- 
tion of the Trinovantes and the other states which 
followed them, Cassivellaunos decided to sue for 
peace through Commios, the Atrebat. Rumours 
from Gaul, not to his liking, had reached Caesar, and 
because he had his former views as to the lateness of 
the season, he seized the opportunity of bringing the 
war to a close at once by demanding hostages and 
fixing the sum which Britain was to pay as a yearly 
tribute. He also gave Cassivellaunos strict orders, 
which cost the giver little, to keep his hands off 
Mandubratios and the Trinovantes. Since it was 
near the equinox when Caesar left, his stay here must 
have been about two months. Of course he did not 
depart empty-handed, for he took with him not only 
the hostages, but also a great number of captives, the 
sale of whom was to fill Roman coffers with gold. 

From Caesar's departure in the year 54 b.c. down 
to the invasion of the island under Claudius in a.d. 43, 
that is to say, for pretty nearly a century, we know 
very little of its history, except what may be made 
out by means of the coins, which began to be stamped 



BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS C^SAR. I9 

with letters soon after Caesar's conquest of Gaul. 
The coinage of Britain had, in the first instance, been 
modelled after that of Gaul, which in its turn can be 
traced to the Phocjean Greeks of Massilia or Marseilles, 
through whom the Continental Gauls became ac- 
quainted in the latter part of the fourth century before 
Christ with the gold stater of Philip II. of Macedon. 
This was a fine coin, weighing about 133 grains and 
having on one side the head of Apollo wreathed with 
laurel, while the other showed a charioteer in his 
chariot, with Philip's name underneath. It was imi- 
tated by the Gauls fairly well at first, but as it got 
farther removed from the original in time and place, 
the figures degenerated into very curious and fantastic 
forms. It has been calculated by Sir John Evans, the 
greatest authority on the subject, that the inhabitants 
of the south of Britain must have begun to coin 
gold pieces of this kind from 200 to 150 b.c.,^ and 
the information he has collected makes it probable 
that this took place first in Kent ; next followed the 
coinage of the other tribes inhabiting the south of 
England, as far as the borders of Dorsetshire. It is also 
worthy of remark that coins of several types are found 
to have been current on the south coast, concerning 
which it is hard to decide whether they should be 
regarded as belonging to Gaul or to Britain. Money 
appears to have circulated as far as Cornwall, though 
there is no satisfactory evidence that any tribe west 
of the Durotriges of Dorset had a coinage of its own. 
Between Dorsetshire and the Worcestershire Avon, 
there was probably more than one tribe that had 

1 Evans's "Coins of the Ancient Britons" (London, 1864), p. 26. 

C 2 



20 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

an early coinage. So had the Catuvellauni, whose 
territory stretched in a north-easterly direction from 
the Thames to the neighbourhood of the Wash, and 
also the Trinovantes, who lived between them and 
the North Sea in Essex and Middlesex. But there 
is no satisfactory evidence that any tribes north of 
these, not even the Eceni, who occupied what is now 
Norfolk and Suffolk, had a coinage of their own when 
Caesar landed in this country; nor does it appear 
that any British tribe whatever had then begun to 
have its coins lettered. It is not certain that silver 
or bronze coins had as yet been struck, though it is 
probable that in any case they came into use 
much later than gold ones. But Caesar is usually 
made to say that no money was current in Britain, 
but only bronze or pieces of iron of a fixed weight 
to supply its place. The passage,^ however, is hope- 
lessly corrupt, and the manuscripts differ greatly, 
some of them ascribing to the Britons the use of 
coins of gold, and some also of bronze. Whatever 
Cfesar wrote there can be little doubt about the 
gold currency : he appears, from the best manu- 
scripts, to have mentioned it, though he ^saw little 
of it, as may be gathered from the correspond- 
ence^ of one of his officers ; and it is by no means 
improbable that ingots of bronze or bars of iron may 
have been used for money among the tribes who had 
no coinage, and that Caesar was aware of that fact 
When he goes on to say that iron was found on the 

' "Bell. Gall.," V. 12. 

^ That ofCicero's brother to Cicero ; see ^'Monumenta Hist. 
Brit.," pp. Ixxxvii., Ixxxviii. 



BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS CASAR. 21 

sea coast of Britain, but that the supply was small, 
he probably alludes to the iron-mining in the weald ot 
Kent and Sussex, which Prof. Boyd Dawkins believes 
to have been carried on before Caesar's landing, as it 
certainly was during the Roman occupation, and for 
many centuries afterwards.^ There is no reason, how- 
ever, to suppose that the great wealth of the country 
in iron ore had been discovered by Caesar's time, and 
the little already found had possibly been pointed out 
by some one who had seen iron worked on the Con- 
tinent. Caesar tells us that the bronze used in the 
island was imported, which would be good evidence 
that copper was not yet worked here, bronze being a 
compound of copper and tin. The importation of 
bronze (aes) and exportation of tin would accordingly 
have formed at this time the most important items in 
the trade of Britain; but there is reason to doubt that 
the inhal:)itants of this country depended to any 
considerable extent on the importation of bronze,^ 
and we seem to be forced either to doubt the 
accuracy of Caesar's information, or to explain his 
use of the term aes as referring to certain bronze 
works of art made in the workshops of the Medi- 
terranean. 

We have now come to an age when the coins of 

^ The last foige appears to have been blown out only in the 
year 1825, though the gi owing scarcity of fuel had driven seveial 
of the ironmasters to South Wales as early as the time of 
Henry VIII. See a paper by Prof. Bcyd Dawkins in the 
Transactions of the " Internal. Congress of Prehi.t. Arch." for 
1868, p. 188. 

2 See Read's Guide to the " Bronze Age Antiquities in the 
British Museum" (London, 1904), pp. 23, 71. 



2 2 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

Britain began to appear with letters on them. This 
is found to have taken place first in Kent, or else 
a little to the west on the southern shore, where 
the Belgic tribes kept up an active communication 
with Gaul. Here we find one or two coins of 
Commios, and a great many of three princes who 
called themselves Sons of Commios. Who this 
Commios was is not known, but he and his sons 
seem to have held sway in much the same part of 
Britain as that in which the Commios of whom Caesar 
speaks had so much influence ; and, on the whole, it 
is not improbable that the latter is also the Commios 
of the coins. He appears to have gone back with 
Caesar to Gaul, as we find him left with some cavalry 
to keep watch the following year over the Menapii, 
who seem to have lived on the coast between 
the Morini and the Rhine. This duty was en- 
trusted him while the general set out against the 
Treveri ; but in 52 B.C. so strong was the desire of 
the Gauls to drive out the Romans, that Commios 
became one of the leaders against the latter : 
so dangerous was he considered, that Labienus, 
Caesar's lieutenant, tried to have him killed by 
treachery, but he got away, though severely wounded. 
He is said some time afterwards to have had a very 
narrow escape from Caesar himself, which he effected 
by betaking himself to his ship, and having its sails 
spread as though he had it already afloat, which it 
was not : the pursuit was given up, and he had time 
to get away to Britain. , He figures, however, in 51 b.c. 
again as one of the chief organizers of opposition 
to Roman rule in Gaul, and when the other chiefs 



BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS C^SAR. 2$ 

had given in their submission, he still held out. There 
was another attempt to murder him by means of 
the same officer as before, but the latter had the 
worst of it, and Commios escaped, whereupon he 
sent in his submission to Antony, then acting under 
Caesar in Gaul, and made it a condition that he 
should be allowed to go where he should not set eyes 
on another Roman. He seems to have been an 
active man in the prime of life, and since we hear no 
more of him it is not unlikely that he came over to 
Britain, and that his hatred of the Romans had been 
sufficiently proved to his kindred here to make them 
forget his having once been one of Caesar's tools, 
if, indeed, they ever took an unfavourable view of 
that part of his history. We need not suppose that 
his influence here had to be acquired all anew, as 
the Atrebates and the other Belgic tribes of Britain 
had probably been induced by him to join the league 
which he and others had organized of their kinsfolk, 
the Continental Atrebates, the Bellovaci, and other 
powerful peoples. As far as can be gathered from 
the places where the coins in question were found, the 
rule of the Commian family did not extend beyond the 
district represented by Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Hants, 
and, perhaps, a part of Wilts. According to Sir J. 
Evans, the lettered coinage of this part of the 
island may be supposed to have appeared some time 
before 30 b.c.^ At his death his territory seems to 
have fallen to his three sons, Tincommios, Verica 
and Eppillos, who are supposed to have exercised 
a sort of joint rulership over it, while each had 
^ Evans's ** Coins of the Ancient Britons," pp. 154, 155. 



24 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

probably a district which was more completely 
under his own control ; that is to say, Eppillos 
ruled over the Cantii, Tincommios over the Regni, 
whose territory may, roughly speaking, be supposed 
to have been that which became the Saxon kingdom 
of Sussex, and Verica over the country of the Atre- 
bates, who appear to have in all possessed what is 
now Berkshire, a part of Oxfordshire reaching as far 
north as Aldchester and Bicester, and a certain 
portion possibly of Surrey. The names of the three 
brothers are found together on one coin, but Tin- 
commios, who seems to have been the eldest, ap- 
pears to have died before the others, as some coins 
occur with their joint names alone. There are 
reasons for supposing Eppillos to have survived 
Verica, of whose territory, together most likely with 
that of Tincommios, he may have become sole ruler : 
at any rate, he appears, so far as one can judge from 
the abbreviated forms used on some coins, to call 
himself king of Calleva, which is identified with 
Silchester in Hampshire. There is no indication 
that Commios or Tincommios called himself king 
of any people in Britain, but Eppillos and Verica 
certainly take the title on some of their coins, whence 
it would seem that Commios had placed himself in 
a position of authority in South Britain as the head 
of a league organized for a special purpose, and that 
he so far consolidated his power as to be able to 
pass it on to his sons, while Eppillos and Verica 
appear to have thought themselves safe in taking the 
title of kings. That was probably not done without 
opposition, and it is not impossible that Eppillos's 



BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS CAESAR. 25 

position among the Cantii was altogether acquired by 
conquest, either in his father's time or soon after, as it 
seems doubtful whether Cantion came within the circle 
of the original influence of Commios, whose direct 
connection would rather seem to have been with the 
Atrebates and the other Belgic tribes west of Cantion. 
We appear to fall in with one of the princes who were 
beaten in the struggle with the Commian family, in one 
or other of the British refugees who are said, on one of 
the monuments^ recounting the events of the reign of 
Augustus, to have sought his protection. The coins 
of Commios, and some of the earlier ones of Tincom- 
mios, continued the degenerate imitations of the 
Macedonian stater without showing any Roman 
influence ; but it was not long after Augustus became 
emperor, that Tincommios copied the Latin formula, 
in which the former styled himself Augustus Divi 
Filius or the son of his adoptive father Julius Caesar, 
who had now begun to be officially called Divus or 
the god. So Tincommios had inscribed on his money 
the legend — Tine. Commi F.^ or even shorter abbrevia- 
tions, meaning Tincommios, son of Commios \ and 
the grotesque traits derived from the stater soon dis- 
appeared in favour of classical designs of various kinds, 
proving very distinctly that the influence of Roman 
art was beginning to make itself felt in the south of 
Britain. With the sons of Commios the coinage of 
the western portion of their territory seems to have 
ceased, whereas in Kent it would appear to have 
continued later. This is supposed to be accounted 
, ^ That of Ancyra in Asia Minor; see the Berlin "Corpus 
Inscr. Lat.," iii. pp. 784, 785, 798, 799. 



26 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

for by the influence of the trade with Gaul, where 
everything was fast being Romanized under Augustus ; 
but it would hardly explain why a native coinage 
should continue longer in Kent, which was after all 
the nearest part of Britain to Gaul. It is rather to be 
supposed that the western part of Eppillos's kingdom 
fell after his day under the power of the encroaching 
Catuvellauni, and that we have to look for the coins 
representing it later among those of that people. 

Now most of the latter are found to have been 
issued by a prince, whose name occurs Latinized as 
Tasciovanus, Tasciovanius, and Tasciovans (genitive 
Tasciovantis), the Tenuantius of Geoffrey of Mon- 
mouth, and by his sons CunobeUnos and Epaticcos. 
The father's capital was Verlamion or Verulam, 
near St. Albans, and the name of the town appears 
on many of his coins, as does that of Camulodunon 
or Colchester, which was Cunobelinos's capital, on his. 
The great variety of Tasciovant's coins seems to show 
that he must have had a long reign, and some of them 
at any rate were struck as late as the year 13 B.C., as 
they are found to have been modelled after coins of 
Augustus, which were not current till that time ; ^ but 
it has been supposed that he lived a good i.iany 
years later, and died only after the beginning of our 
era. Others of his coins show that he reigned for 
some time during the life of Eppillos, but at 
what date he began we have no means of finding 
out, though it has been supposed to have been as 
early as the year 30, when Augustus was made em- 
peror, and some of the coins would seem to point even 
^ Evans's " Coins of the Anc. Brit., " p. 223. 



BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS CiESAR. 27 

to an earlier date. This would bring Tasciovant suffi- 
ciently near Cassivellaunos in point of time for him to 
have been his son or a brother's son ; but possibly 
we should rather say a grandson. In either case, there 
is no reason to suppose that there had in the mean- 
time been a revolution or a change of dynasty, es- 
pecially as we find Cunobelinos, the Cymbeline of 
Shakspere, styling himself on some coins rex or king ; 
and we seem to be at liberty to assume, in the absence 
of evidence to the contrary, that the people of the 
Catuvellauni had been guided by the more or less 
uniform policy of one dynasty in their treatment of 
neighbouring states. This appears on lookmg into 
the scanty data at our disposal to have been one of 
conquest and aggression. Thus Caesar mentions how 
the king of the Trinovantes had been slain by 
Cassivellaunos, when his son Mandubratios fled to 
him. How long the losses which Cassivellaunos and 
his people suffered during Caesar's campaign inclined 
them to leave the Trinovantes alone cannot be made 
out, but we learn from the coins that Cunobehnos 
ruled there and had made Camulodunon in the heart 
of their country his capital, which probably happened 
during Tasciovant's lite and with his help. Possibly 
Mandubratios v/as left unassailed as long as he lived ; 
but the coinage of the country of the Trinovantes 
bears evidence to the rule for a time of a prince 
whose name was Dubnovellaunos, and who is men- 
tioned on the Augustan monument, already referred 
to, as one of the two British princes who sought 
the emperor's protection. His history is rendered 
somewhat difficult by the fact that his coins are also 



28 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

found in Kent (and those, so far as can be guessed, 
his earlier ones), whence it would seem that he ruled 
over a certain extent of territory on both sides of the 
Thames. From his southern position he may have 
been driven by Eppillos, with whom he appears to 
have been contemporary, and from the northern one 
some time later by Cunobelinos. It is not impossible 
that the territory of the Trinovantes originally com- 
prised a part of the southern coast of the estuary of 
the Thames, and certain it is that both the Isle of 
Thanet and that of Sheppey are placed opposite the 
Trinovantes by Ptolemy, who may, perhaps, have 
regarded them as belonging to that people. 

Between the Catuvellauni and the North Sea there 
were, besides the Trinovantes, the people of the 
Eceni, occupying the country between them and the 
Wash. When the former had been reduced by the 
Catuvellauni, the turn of the latter, in case it had not 
come before, could not be very far off: it may be 
that we have them heading Caesar's list of the states 
which, after the example of the Trinovantes. deserted 
Cassivellaunos in the hour of need. But that is by no 
means certain, since the name appears in the manu- 
scripts of Caesar as Cenimagni, Cenomagni, and Ceno- 
manni, which may possibly be considered mutilated 
forms of some such longer title of the nation of 
the Eceni as Ecenimagni or the like : it may be 
that he meant a Belgic tribe from the south of the 
Thames. The others mentioned were the Segontiaci, 
Ancalites, Bibroci, and Cassi, all probably Belgic 
tribes, living near the Thames or between its 
basin and the Severn, and included as it may be 



BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS CvESAR. 29 

supposed under the more general name of Atrebates. 
Such the Bibroci appear to have been, whose 
name reminds one of the town of the Remi, called 
Bibrax, and of Caesar's statement, that almost all 
the Belgic peoples of Britain bore the name of the 
Continental state they had come from ; but the 
exact locality either of the Bibroci or of the Ancalites 
cannot be said to be known, though nothing 
serious stands in the way of the guess which identifies 
the name of the former with the Berroc, whence the 
modern name of the county of Berks is derived. The 
Segontiaci are connected with the neighbourhood of 
the Silchester Calleva by the finding there of a 
Roman inscription in honour of a divinity styled the 
Segontiac Hercules; and as some of Tasciovant's coins 
bear the name of this people, or of one of its towns, 
we may conclude that they had been forced into an 
alliance with the Catuvellauni. This does not stand 
alone ; for the coins of Epaticcos seem to prove 
that he held sway south of the Thames, in what is 
now the county of Surrey. The name of the Cassi 
would be lisped in GauHsh and then spelt CADDI 
or Ca00i, which less accurately written in Latin 
letters may be detected in the Catii of coins found in 
Gloucestershire and the neighbouring county of 
Monmouth. They were either a branch of the 
Atrebates, or else, perhaps, of the people of the 
Dobunni, to whom they were near neighbours. The 
latter occupied most of the tract between the two 
Avons and between the Severn and the states of the 
Atrebates and the Catuvellauni, while Dion Cassius, 
in speaking of the campaign of Aulus Plautius in that 



30 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

district in the year 43, gives one to understand that 
either the whole or a portion of the people of the 
Dobunni was subject to the Catuvellauni at that time. 
The inland tract between the Catuvellauni and the 
Dobunni on the one hand, and the tribes grouping 
themselves with the Brigantes of the north beyond 
the Humber and the Mersey on the other, was 
inhabited by two peoples, that of the Coritani in the 
district between the Wash and the Trent, which con- 
tained the towns of Lincoln and Leicester, and that 
of the Cornavii to the west of the Coritani, which 
reached from about the Worcestershire Avon to the 
mouths of the Dee and the Mersey. Of these peoples 
exceedingly little is known, and they play no appre- 
ciable part in the resistance offered to the Roman arms 
in the time of Claudius, so we may, perhaps, infer 
that they were virtually conquered with the Catu- 
vellauni, as having been for some time the allies or 
subjects of that state. In that case the Catuvellauni 
may be regarded as the Mercians of those days, a 
supposition aptly illustrated by the fact that they 
chose to call themselves by a name meaning battle- 
rulers or war-kings, like that of the Caturiges of 
Gaul; and it is in their aggressiveness that we have 
probably to look in the first instance for the secret of 
the influence of Commios in Britain, which Caesar has 
left unexplained. The Belgic tribes of the Thames 
Valley were, we may take it, hard pressed by the 
Catuvellauni ; they sent to ask their kindred in Gaul 
for help, and Commios came over to aid them with 
his genius, and possibly with armed men ; but whether 
that was so or not — for there is no evidence — there 



BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS C^SAR. 3 1 

would be nothing very surprising in a man of his 
ability having organized oUch resistance as would stay 
for a time the advance of the Catuvellauni. It 
may, indeed, be that he was not the first to come 
over for that purpose, but that something of the 
kind had happened already in the time of Divi- 
ciacos, who, as Caesar was informed, had been 
king of the Belgic people of the Suessiones within 
his time, and not only possessed more power than 
any other man in Gaul, but exercised it also in 
Britain. 1 However that may be, Commios may 
have seen that the advance of the Catuvellauni could 
not be long stayed, and that was his reason, or at 
least one of his reasons, for taking an active part in 
Caesar's invasion. If so, it may be that the losses 
which Caesar inflicted on the Cantii and the Catu- 
vellauni resulted in relieving the Belgic states of 
all immediate fear of their neighbours, and in 
adding to the popularity of Commios. In that case 
he would have little or no trouble in making himself 
the head of a league directed against the Catuvel- 
launi, when he was forced to leave Gaul, whence he 
brought with him also credit for an intense hatred 
of the Romans. All this would agree well enough 
with the fact that it was probably among the people of 
Kent that he was detained in bonds, when he landed 
as C?esar'"s envoy ; and it has already been suggested 
that it was possibly by force of arms that his son 
Eppillos asserted his power there some time after- 
wards. 

1 ''Bell. Gall.,"ii. 4. 



32 CELTIC BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER II. 

BRITAIN DOWN TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 

For a good many years preceding the Claudian in- 
vasion in the year 43, Cunobehnos was the most con- 
spicuous figure in Britain, and Suetonius, who wrote 
his history of the Caesars some seventy or eighty 
years later, speaks of him as Rex Britannorum^ or 
King of the Britons. From this, together with other 
indications, it would seem that his power reached to 
the southern coast, though it is hardly probable that 
he had removed all the princes of the states south of 
the Thames. It is more likely that he was satisfied with 
forcing them into an alliance with him, and allowing 
some of them to rule in their own states subject 
to some kind of supremacy on his part. Whether 
the fugitives who sought the aid of Augustus were 
able to induce him to assist them we are not told, 
but historians state that Augustus once meditated 
an expedition against Britain, and it may be that it 
was the representations of the former that led him 
thereto. This never came to anything, for the princes 
of Britain hastened to send ambassadors to him to 
prevent war, and some of them, we are told, gained 
his friendship. We may take it that Cunobelinos, the 

^ Suetonius, "be Vita Caesarum," Caligula, 44. 



PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 33 

most wealthy and powerful of them, was the most suc- 
'Cessful in winning the emperor's good graces, and if 
the exiles ever returned it was probably subject to cer- 
tain conditions which he thought it right to indicate. 
Strabo, who wrote not many years after the death of ^■ 
Augustus, in 14 B.C., goes on to say that the British 
princes who were on friendly terms with the emperor 
dedicated their offerings in the Capitol at Rome, 
and brought the island well-nigh to a state of close 
connection with the Roman power. This is quite 
in harmony with what we learn from Cunobelinos's 
coins. His father's, which were much on a level 
with those of Eppillos, show far less of the in- 
fluence of Rome, while it is unmistakable on those of 
Cunobelinos, with the exception of some few of his 
early ones, which are purely British and belong to 
the series derived from the Macedonian stater. The 
workmanship improves, and a variety* of classical 
figures, such as Jupiter Ammon, Apollo playing on 
the lyre, Hercules with his club or with the trophies 
of some of his labours, Janus, Diana, Cybele on a 
lion. Victory in various attitudes, and many other 
mythical personages of the same class, together with 
sphinxes, griffins, and other monsters of southern 
mythology, take the place of the clumsier forms on 
the more purely British money. The coinage of 
Gaul was now becoming Roman, and the improve- 
ment in that of Britain was no longer perhaps so 
much a matter of taste as of commercial expediency, 
on which some light is thrown by the fact that 
Augustus thought proper to commute the year's 

D 



34 CELTIC BRITAIN. ^ , 

► tribute for a light export and import duty on the 
trade between it and Gaul. This, so far as it goes, 
would indicate that the trade was not inconsider- 
able. In any case we are not to suppose the 
emperor capable of despising any source of income 
which could be made to bring money into his 
coffers. 

Augustus was succeeded by Tiberius, who died in 

^ the year 37 without having troubled himself in any 
way, so far as we know, with the affairs of Britain. 

^ He was followed by Caligula, who was emperor until 
his death in the year 41. In his time Britain appears 
again in history, as follows : — In the year 40 a son 
of Cunobelinos, called Adminius by Suetonius who 
gives the account, surrendered himself with a small 
number of followers to Caligula in Gaul, when he had 
for some reason or other been banished by his own 
father. Thereupon the emperor sent a letter to Rome 
describing in fine language how the island of Britain 
had been added to the Roman power, the messengers 
being charged to deliver his message to the senate 
only in full assembly in the Temple of Mars. This 
freak of imperial madness corroborates the view that 
Cunobelinos was at that time, in the opinion of the 
Romans, the only British king who was worth con- 
sidering, and explains why Suetonius calls him king 
of the Britons. But of his son, who made this cheap 
surrender of his father's kingdom to Caligula, nothing 
further is known, excepting that he was possibly the 
same person whose name is written Amminus on some 
coins of this time, the finding-place of which tends 



PREVIOUS TO THE CL AUDI AN CONQUEST. 35 

to connect him with some part of Kent. Cunobelinos 
had other sons, but the only ones known to history 
were Togodumnos and Caratacos, who ruled over 
their deceased father's kingdom when Claudius sent 
Aulus Plautius here. So he must have died be- 
tween the years 40 and 43, at a very advanced 
age, and after having carried into effect with con- 
siderable success the family policy of bringing 
the neighbouring states under the rule of the Catu- 
vellauni. 

A variety of coins, of which neither the exact age 
or place of issue nor the sequence has been satisfac- 
torily made out, are assigned to the country of the 
Dobunni ; but, on the whole, none of them are con- 
sidered to date before the Christian era, while some 
appear to be as late as the time of Claudius, whose 
reign begins with the year 41. They tend to show 
that some of the Dobunni were so far independent 
of the Catuvellauni as to have had a coinage of their 
own. It may be, however, that the latest of them 
were struck after the death of Togodumnos in 43 and 
the conquest of his people by the Romans, that is, in 
the interval before the reduction of the country in 
the neighbourhood of the Bristol Avon by Ostorius 
Scapula in the year 50. They all belong to the series 
of imitations of the Macedonian stater, and show 
hardly a trace of the influence of Rome, excepting 
that two or three of the names are given in a Latin 
rather than in a Gaulish spelling. One group, that 
of the Catti, a word already mentioned as being 
probably the name of a people, the Cassi of Caesar's 

D 2 



36 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

Commentaries, is remarkable as showing no trace of 
the name of any prince or king. 

The next region distinctly indicated by the pecu- 
liarities of its coinage is the country of the Eceni, 
otherwise called Iceni, and inhabiting approximately 
the modern counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. Trade 
and the east wind travelled westwards, leaving the 
Eceni on their peninsula to defy a little longer the 
Roman influence to which Cunobelinos and his people 
had been giving way, and which now reached the land 
of the Dobunni on the banks of the Severn. The Eceni 
seem, from what we read of them afterwards, to have 
been a remarkably hardy and warlike race, but, just 
as they may have been among those who deserted 
Cassivellaunos in order to make their own terms 
with Caesar, so their old jealousy and fear of the 
power of the Catuvellauni when Cunobelinos had 
succeeded in combining with it that of the Trino- 
vantes were partly, no doubt, the cause which led 
them in 43 to make an alliance with the Romans, 
which they soon began to regret. The earliest group 
of coins which has been supposed to belong to them 
bears the name of A-ddedomaros ; but it is by no means 
certain that the prince so named ruled over the Eceni 
rather than over some neighbouring tribe, among 
whom Cunobelinos found the means of supplanting or 
succeeding him. His coins would then be the only gold 
ones of the Eceni with any reading on them, and, had 
they really been theirs, it is hardly probable that they 
would have reverted to uninscribed ones, for such 
they certainly seem to have had after his time, botl\ 



PREVIOUS TO tHE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 37 

in gold and silver. Belt together with their unin- 
scribed silver coins they used inscribed ones, some of 
which are remarkable as showing the name of the 
people in the abbreviated form of ecen without a 
trace of that of any prince or king accompanying it, 
which calls to mind the coins of the Catti. It would 
thus seem that at this time the Eceni had no kings. 
Their latest coins, however, show the name of one 
Antedrigus, who may have been king or else chief 
magistrate of a state which had no king : we cannot 
say which, as there are no means of deciding. But if 
the following facts be put together, to wit, that Ante- 
drigus, the name of this man, appears a little later, 
sometimes in its Celtic spelling and sometimes Latin- 
ized, on coins in the land of the Dobunni ; that Dion 
Cassius^ mentions one Bericos, who, driven out of 
Britain by an insurrection, went to persuade Claudius 
to send out an expedition against it, which was 
done in 43 ; and lastly that, when the Romans came, 
the Eceni entered into an alliance with them without 
fighting, though they were by no means a likely 
people to have shrunk from the horrors of war, 
their history may be guessed — that is all — and sum- 
marised thus : — The Eceni had experienced a revolu- 
tion, which put an end to the kingly power among 
them ; the state became the prey of two factions, 
headed by Bericos and Antedrigus respectively ; 
their dispute may have been of the same nature as 
that which Julius Csesar was called upon to decide 

^ '* Roman History, ' Ix. 19, 23, 



^S CELTIC BRITAIN. 

among the ^^dui,^ that is, one between two nobles, each 
of whom insisted that he was the duly elected king for 
the year ; Antedrigus prevailed, and issued coins with 
his name on them ; and Bericos fled to Claudius to 
ask him to invade the island, promising him the aid 
of his friends and of the state of the Eceni if he 
placed him in the position occupied by his rival. 
When the Roman forces arrived, Bericos and his friends 
made a handle of the Eceni's jealousy of the power 
of the Catuvellauni to induce the former to enter into 
an alliance with the Roman power ; he obtained his 
desire, and Antedrigus had to flee, but was hospitably 
received by the Dobunni, among whom he organized 
resistance to the Romans for some years afterwards, 
much in the same way as Caratacos did among the 
Silures after having to leave his own people in the 
power of the conqueror. All this, though only a 
conjecture, would agree best with the view that the 
Eceni never were reduced by Cunobelinos ; and he 
certainly can have had no hand in regulating their 
coinage, which betrays no trace of the influence of 
Roman art or of the Latin language, except in so far 
as the Gaulish orthography used in this country at 
that time was a sort of mixture of Greek and Latin 
letters. 

Nothing can be said to be known as yet of the 
coinage of the Cornavii and the Coritani, though it 
is not improbable that both peoples may have had 
for a short time coins of their own make. In fact, it 
is thought that it was through the latter that acquaint- 
' 1 "Bell. Gall," vii. 32, 33. 



PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUBIAN CONQUEST. 39 

ance with money was first made by the people on 
the shores of the Humber, whose couiage is the 
rudest of all, and the one most Hke that of the 
Eceni, though it is impossible to trace it directly to 
the latter. This coinage, moreover, appears to have 
been the latest, being apparently of the time of 
Claudius or in part later ; it may be supposed to have 
come to an end about the time when the Brigantes, 
whose sway extended over much of the country from 
the Humber and Mersey as far perhaps as the Cale- 
donian Forest, submitted to the Roman yoke soon 
after the year 69. In vain, however, do we scan the 
coins in question for any of the historical names of 
that people, such as Cartismandua, Venutios, or Vello- 
catus ; in fact, there is no reason for supposing them 
to have belonged to the Brigantes so much as to a 
people inhabiting the districts now known as Holder- 
ness and the Yorkshire Wolds — possibly the whole 
coast from the Humber to the Tees. In Ptolemy's 
Geography, a great work published about the year 
120, they are called Parisi, which makes it probable 
that they were a branch of the Parish on the Seine, 
who have left their name to the city of Paris. Their 
town, called Petuaria, has its name possibly per- 
petuated in that of Patringion in Holderness, and 
Ptolemy places them also around what he calls the 
Fair-havened Bay, referring probably to the once im- 
portant harbour of Hornsea. We find other towns of 
theirs besides Petuaria in the Delgovicia of the ancients, 
which was probably Market Weighton, and in Der. 
ventio, somewhere on the Derwent, probably Kexby 



40 



CELTIC BRITAIN. 



or Elvington. Some of the barrows of this people, 
containing the remains of war-chariots and other things 
of the Iron Age, also connect them with Market 
Weighton, Beverley, Pocklington, and other localities 
in the East Riding. It is also very possible that they 
took possession of a large tract of country to the 
south of the Humber. Bat when did the Parisi 
arrive in this country ? Was it before the Brigantes, 
so that the latter had to land on the coast north of 
their territory ? or did they come after the Brigantes, 
and succeed in seizing a pari of their territory by 
main force ? and, if so, how late did they make their 
appearance in the Humber ? These are questions 
one has at present no means of answering ; but it is 
clear that at the time in question the Parisi were 
sufficiently independent of their powerful neighbours 
to. have had a coinage of their own. Some of the 
pieces extant are interesting moreover as giving the 
title granted to the person in whose name they 
were issued. Thus one Volisios styles himself some- 
times Domnocoveros and sometimes Domnoveros, 
which may possibly have meant the guardian of the 
state, or the man of the people. At any rate, it has 
been observed that the same term occurs on a coin of 
Dumnorix, the ^duan, whose great popularity^ with 
the common people Caesar dwells upon more than 
once. This, in fact, was one of the reasons why he 
was distrusted and ordered to be cut down when he 
refused to follow Caesar on his second expedition to 
Britain. On another of these northern coins the 
1 '*Bell. Gall.,"i. 3, 9, 18,20. 



PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 4T 

person who issued it gives himself a title, which, if 
correctly read Senotigirnios, would hterally mean the 
old lord or old monarch, whatever the exact official 
signification of that may have been among the Parisi. 
Unfortunately, the relation of these two kinds of coins 
to one another in point of time is not known ; should 
they turn out to be of the same date, they might be 
taken to prove the state to have been divided into 
two parties, the one clinging to the representative of 
a dynasty, and the other rallying round one who gave 
himself out as the friend of the people. If we do not 
misunderstand their coins, the Parisi may briefly be 
said to have been in the condition of a people who 
were either struggling to cast away the kingly yoke, or 
who had succeeded in doing so, and were threatened 
with a tyranny of a different kind — that of the adven- 
turer who seeks power by hoodwinking the crowd. A 
somewhat doubtful exception is to be made as to the 
language being Gaulish, in the case of a group of 
coins with the letters vep corf, which are possibly to 
be treated as Latin^ standing for vep. cor.f., mean- 
ing " Vepogenos son of Correos," or the like. In that 
case they might reasonably be regarded as the last 
native money coined in early Britain. 

Pomponius Mela, a Spanish writer of the first 
century, states that the farther a British people was 
from the Continent, the less it knew of any other 
wealth than flocks and land ', but some of them 
probably made use of ingots of bronze, of bars of iron, 
such as Caesar alludes to, and also, perhaps, of rings or 
pellets of gold, as a medium of exchange. Nor did 



42 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

the coined money of the southern states fail to get 
admission to others far away from them. Thus there 
is an instance on record of one of the coins of the 
Dobunni being found as far north as Dumfries, while 
several have been discovered in Monmouthshire — that 
is to say, in the land of the Silures, who would seem 
to have been the people meant by Solinus, when he 
states that the inhabitants of what he calls the Island 
of Silura would have nothing to do with money^ at a 
time not before the first century, and possibly a good 
deal later. A study of the early money of Britain 
also throws some light on the paths of intercourse 
between it and the Continent. The shortest of these, 
and probably the earliest in use for trade, was between 
Kent and the neighbouring coast of Gaul : it always 
continued, no doubt, to be the route along which 
the trade with the south-east ot Britain was carried 
on. According to Pliny ^ quoting from Timseus, who 
wrote about the middle of the fourth century before 
our era, and got his information probably from 
Pytheas, Thanet may have been the island at high 
tide to which the tin of the west was brought in 
coracles by the natives for sale to the merchants who 
came for it from Gaul. The coasting voyage seems to 
have taken the former six days to make. But there 
was another line of communication, the use of which 
was probably never discontinued from the time when 
Belgic tribes first settled in the island. The Belg« 
advanced westwards into Gaul, being pressed forward 

' "Solinus," edited by Mommsen, p. 114. 
2 "Hist. Nat.," iv. 16(30). 



PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 43 

probably by the Teutonic peoples in their rear. When 
they got familiar enough with the sea to cross the 
Channel, some of them continued the westward 
course of their race, and may be supposed to have 
landed in the harbours between Dungeness and the 
mouth of the Dorsetshire Stour. There is no evidence 
that either the Cantii on the one side, or the Durotriges 
and the peninsular tribes behind them, on the other, 
should be considered Belgic. From the intervening 
line of coast the Belgae spread to the Thames and 
pressed westwards to the Severn Sea ; while the terri- 
tory of those who retained that name in Britain lay 
between that of the Regni, the Atrebates, and the 
Dobunni on the one hand, and the line on the other of 
the Dorsetshire Stour and the Mendip Hills, beyond 
which were the Durotriges and the Dumnonii. The 
early coins on the Belgic seaboards of Britain and Gaul 
are far from easy to distinguish, and they bear ample 
evidence to the truth of the tradition reported by 
Caesar that Belgic tribes had made themselves a home!/ 
in the south of the island. How far their line of 
communication became also the route for trade it is 
hard to say : possibly some of the tin of Cornwall was 
brought into their territory and then conveyed to 
some place near the mouth of the Seine. There 
is also numismatic evidence of a connection between 
the British coast and the Channel Islands, whence 
it probably extended to the. opposite coast of Gaul : 
the coins in question point to the time of Claudius, 
but the intercourse they indicate may have begun 
much earlier. No inscribed money seems to have 



44 CELTIC BRITAIN. . . 

been coined by the tribes west of the Belgas, but it 
is possible that the Durotriges may have had an unin- 
scribed coinage ; and they seem to have had the coins 
of other tribes in circulation among them, both in- 
scribed and uninscribed ones at the same time, so 
that they were in that respect somewhat more back- 
ward than the Eceni. Whether the Durotriges were 
Goidels or Brythons is not quite certain, but, on the 
whole, they may be classified with their neighbours, 
the Dumnonii, the remains of whose language in Devon 
and Cornwall leave us in no doubt that they were of 
the earlier Celts or Goidels, not of the Brythons. Nor 
is it improbable that, in point of civilisation, they were 
behind the inhabitants of the south-east of the island, 
with the exception of the people of the tin districts, 
y which in ancient times were chiefly Dartmoor, with 
the country around Tavistock, and that around St. 
Austell, including several valleys looking towards 
the southern coast of Cornwall. In most of the other 
districts where tin existed it is supposed to have 
lain too deep to have been worked in early times. 
In the Scilly Isles, which have been sometimes 
erroneously identified with the Cassiterides of 
ancient authors neither is tin worked now, nor are the 
old workings there either numerous or deep. The 
information which we have about this part of the 
country is scanty : some uninscribed coins which 
were current among the Durotriges and on the 
Belgic coast of Britain have been found in Corn- 
wall, which would again suggest a trade in tin along 
the southern coast in the direction of Thanet. Then 



y 



[/" 



PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 45 

we come to a contemporary of Cicero's, the Greek 
geographer Posidonius, to whom we have already 
alluded as having extended his travels to Cornwall, . 
which he called Belerion, a name given afterwards 
by Ptolemy to the Land's End : his account of the 
country he saw has been preserved to us by Diodorus, 
who wrote a little later. That author tells^ us, among 
other things, that the inhabitants of this promon- 
tory of Britain called Belerion were very fond of 
strangers, and that from their intercourse with foreign 
merchants they were civilised in their manner of life. 
According to him, they prepared the tin by working 
very skilfully the earth in which it was found : the 
ground was rocky, but it contained earthy veins, 
the produce of which was ground down, smelted, and 
purified. The metal, we are further told, was made 
into slabs of the form of knuckle-bones, and carried 
to a certain island lying off the coast of Britain, called 
Ictis. During the ebb of the tide the intervening 
space was left dry, and to that place they carried over 
abundance of tin in their waggons. And, after a few 
words about such islands at high water, he goes on to 
say that in one of them the merchants bought the 
tin from the natives and carried it over to Gaul ; and 
that, after travelling overland for about thirty days, 
they finally brought their loads on packhorses to the 
outlet of the Rhone, that is to say, to the meeting of 
the Rhone and the Saone, where the wharfs for the 
tin barges were erected. Diodorus further states,^ 

^ See " Bib]. Hist.," v. 22, and Elton, p. 36. 

2 See "Bibl. Hist.," v. 38. 



46 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

after mentioning the tin brought from the Cassiterides, 
which he places off the coast of Spain, that much was 
also carried across from Britain to the opposite 
shore of Gaul, and was thence brought on horse- 
back through the midst of the Celtic country to 
Marseilles, and also to the city of Narbonne. This 
refers to the tin of the Dumnonian peninsula, 
and shows that quantities of it were then carried 
to an island lying to the east, whence the passage 
to Gaul was short. It has been argued that the 
island itself can hardly have been St. Michael's 
Mount, as some suppose, since that, it is said, 
does not seem to have been an island at all in 
old times ; nor was it the Isle of Wight, for that was 
never accessible on foot ; while some authors are 
strongly of opinion that it was no other than Thanet,i 
which must formerly have corresponded completely 
to the description already cited. This view would 
explain Caesar's singular statement that British tin 
came from the inland parts of the country ;2 but the 
question of the transit is too difficult for us to 
settle. In earlier times the tin seems to have been 
brought from the west in boats, if one may trust 
the somewhat obscure account given by Timseus. 
So one might infer that between his time and that of 
Posidonius and Caesar some considerable improve- 
ment had been made in the matter of roads in the 
south of Britain. 

Was there, then, any trade in tin carried on directly 

^ See this question discussed in Elton's book, i. pp. 34, &c. 
2 " Bell. Gall.," v. 12. 



PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 47 

between Cornwall and the Continent, continued 
from the time of the Carthaginians or Phoenicians ? 
The evidence as to the presence of Phoenicians in 
Britain at one time is not very convincing ; but we 
have a sort of proof in the writings of Festus Avienus, 
a somewhat confused poet of the fourth century, that 
Himilco, in the flourishing times of Carthage, carried 
his voyage of discovery as far as this country. Recent 
writers are inclined to accept this ; and if there ever 
was Carthaginian commerce with the tin districts of 
Britain, it was probably continued by the Veneti, in 
whose hands the trade with this country was in 
Caesar's time. These last traded in tin, which they 
landed at the mouths of the Garonne and the Loire, 
whence it was carried across to Marseilles and Nar- 
bonne : at one time they probably landed British 
tin at the mouth of the latter river, and they fetched 
some of it, at any rate, from the south-east of Britain ; 
but whatever direct trade in tin there may have been 
between the tin districts of Britain and the Loire 
must have been utterly unknown to Caesar. It is 
remarkable, also, that the Dumnonii neither had a 
coinage of their own, nor appear to have made much 
use of money at all. This seems to suggest the in- 
ference that they lived practically much farther from 
the commerce of the south of Europe than did the 
British peoples to the east of them. However fond 
they may have been of strangers, they would seem to 
have bartered their tin mainly for the trinkets of the 
Mediterranean and other such ornamental rubbish as 
a barbarous people is wont to delight in. But this 



48 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

must not be understood to prove that there was no 
communication between the Dumnonii and the nearest 
part of Gaul during the Venetic period : in fact, 
Dumnonia was probably the part of Britain in which 
the Gaulish students of druidism mentioned by Caesar 
usually landed : possibly, however, this communication 
is not to be regarded as being then of very old standing. 
The Carthaginians had extended their trade in tin from 
Spain to Gaul, and some stream-works of the Bronze 
Age are known to have been carried out in certain 
localities, among others in the Morbihan^ or the 
country of the Veneti. It is to this contact with the Car- 
thaginians that we are, no doubt, to trace the beginning 
of the naval power of the Veneti, who, at the end of 
the Second Punic War and the downfall of the Car- 
thaginian power in Spain, succeeded so completely to 
their trade in tin, that there is no record of any inter- 
ruption in the supply to the markets of the Mediter- 
ranean. They landed the metal at the mouth of 
the Loire and of the Garonne, bringing some of it 
from the Cassiterides or tin-islands, now supposed to 
have originally meant the British Isles. The trade 
with the Cassiterides had been kept in such mystery 
that no Roman could find out anything respecting it 
until Publius Crassus^ succeeded in personally ascer- 
taining all about it ; but that he was Caesar's lieutenant 
of that name, who was sent by him to subdue the 
hostile tribes in Aquitania, is very doubtful. If the 
Veneti were in the habit of importing the tin of 

' Boyd Dawkins's "Early Man in Britain," p. 403, 
2 Strabo, iii., ii (C, 176). 



PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 49 

Britain directly from where it was found to the mouth 
of the Loire, the fact that Caesar did not know of it, 
would go to prove how closely they kept their secret. 

Caesar's account^ of the fleet of the Veneti shows 
that it had made a deep impression on his mind : their 
ships, he says, were of a large size and stood so high 
out of the water that the Romans could not well 
attack them with their missiles, and even when they 
raised turrets on their galleys they were not so high 
as the poops of the Venetian ships. They were 
made of solid oak, with decks a foot thick, fastened 
with bolts of iron as thick as a man's thumb, while 
the metal used in making the ships in which Caesar 
passed into Britain is mentioned as being bronze. 
The former vessels had sails of hides, and their 
anchors were fastened by means of iron chains instead 
of ropes, while the beaks of the Roman galleys could 
do their hulls no harm. When, however, they had 
to manceuvre within a small area, they had the worst 
of it as soon as the Romans bethought themselves 
of sharp hooks with long handles to cut their ropes 
and render the sails, on which they depended, use- 
less. Up to their unsuccessful contest with Caesar in 
56, the Veneti not only carried on most of the trade 
with Britain, or levied a tax on all others who took 
part in it, but they counted among their allies all the 
maritime tribes from the Loire to the country of the 
Morini and Menapii, and they obtained help also from 
Britain, whence it may be gathered, as they mainly 
relied on what they could do at sea, that the ships of 
1 "Bell. Gall." iii. 13, 
£ 



50 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

all the members of this Armoric or maritime league 
were much of the same make, whether in Gaul or 
in Britain : some idea of their number may be 
formed from the fact that the Veneti managed to get 
together on their own coast south of Brittany about 
220 vessels fully manned to oppose Cesar's fleet, as 
soon as it sailed out of the Loire. They were, as 
already suggested, not fitted for war, but for trading 
on a sea which Caesar ever and anon dwells upon as 
vast and exposed, where the difficulty of navigation 
seemed to him, who never knew exactly what to 
make of the ebb and flow of the tide, to be extreme, 
and where the harbours were ftw and far between, or 
hardly existed at all ; in other words, he seems to have 
regarded their vessels as eminently qualified for 
long voyages. But how far those ancient sailors of the 
Armoric league, who had not the mariner's compass, 
ventured out on the open sea, where they had no 
coast-hne to guide them, we have no means of ascer- 
taining, but, as a rule, they may be supposed to have 
hugged the shore. The most important elements in 
the Veneti's trade with Britain in Caesar's time appear 
to have been the exportation of tin and the 
importation of various kinds of articles to be 
worn as ornaments and amulets ; and, when 
Strabo wrote some seventy or more years later, 
he groups the imports contemptuously together as 
ivory rings, necklaces, red amber, glass-ware, and 
such-like trumpery.^ ■ Still more interesting is 
Strabo's account of the things produced in the island, 
^ Strabo, iv. 5 (C. 199, 200}, 



PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDlAN CONQUEST 5 1 

namely, corn, cattle, gold, silver, and iron : these, 
he writes, were all exported to the Continent, 
together with skins, slaves, and dogs fitted for the 
chase and for war as carried on by the Gauls. The 
exportation of corn and cattle would seem to imply 
that the country had enjoyed a period of considerable 
prosperity after Caesar's departure, and the mention 
of gold and silver is interesting, but not so much so 
as the fact that by this time iron, which was veryv^ 
scarce when Caesar was here, was now found in suffi- 
cient quantities to become an article of export. 
Where the slaves chiefly came from is not indicated, 
but it was probably from the more remote parts of 
the island, and possibly also from Ireland ; a still 
more important question about them must likewise 
be left unanswered, and that is whether they were 
wholly or mostly captives taken in war. 

By way of summarizing these remarks, one 
may say that there is no reason to think that the 
conquest of the Veneti and the Armoric league by •' 
Caesar caused the art of ship-building, such as they 
had learnt it from the Carthaginians of Spaiu; to be 
lost on the shores of Gaul and Britain ; indeed, his 
breaking down their monopoly may have had quite 
the contrary effect, and it is not improbable that 
the ships of the Veneti became the pattern for all 
vessels used afterwards by the Romans in British 
waters, so that our marine of the present day may be 
regarded as, in a manner, deriving its descent through 
the shipping of the Veneti from that of the Cartha- 
ginians and the proud merchants of Tyr^ and Sidon. 

E 2 



"52 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

In Other respects, the connection with the Roman 
world into which Csesar brought Britain gave a 
powerful impetus to the trade between them, and 
opened a door for the Roman influence evidenced 
here by the way some of the coins, to which attention 
has been called, were got up, as well as by the 
beginning, to which they testify, of the use of Latin 
as the official language of this country. I>ooking, 
then, at its inhabitants from this point of view, 
and as they were before the Claudian invasion, 
we may say that those of the south-east were the 
most civilized, and that some of those of Brythonic 
or Gaulish descent, occupying the tract from the 
Severn Sea to the Isle of Thanet, and from the 
Channel to the Tees, had progressed so far as to 
have money of their own coining. Of the Goidelic 
branch, it appears that the Durotriges may have had 
a letterless coinage, that the Dumnonii, without 
actually excluding coins from their country, showed 
probably a marked preference for the nick-nacks of 
Mediterranean workshops, while barter was the only 
way of doing business understood by the Silures 
and the other Goidelic tribes of the remoter parts 
of the island. 

Let us now leave the coins and commerce of the 
early Britons, to take a somewhat more comprehen- 
sive view of their habits. Caesar, who penetrated 
north of the Thames, had ample opportunities of 
observing the appearance of the country, and of 
learning much about the inhabitants, but there is no 
reason to suppose that he saw any representatives 



PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 53 

of the older Celtic settlers, or of the non-Celtic abori- / 
gines, excepting possibly as slaves. He considered 
the country very thickly inhabited, and the abundance 
of cattle to be deserving of notice. The buildings he 
saw resembled those of Gaul, and were very numerous, 
but according to him the British idea of a town or 
fortress was a place with a tangled wood round it, 
and fortified with a rampart and ditch ; inside this 
they would, as Strabo tells us, build their huts and 
collect their cattle, but not with a view of remaining 
there long. Caesar regarded the people of Kent, 
whom he thought by far the most civilized, as onh 
slightly differing from those of Gaul; and Diodoru 
draws a contrast between the simple and frugal habits 
of the Britons and the luxurious way of living, 
consequent on riches, with which he was familiar. 
The thickness of the population in the south-east, 
and the habit of harvesting the corn in spacious barns, 
would naturally lead one to suppose that it was largely 
and successfully grown there even then ; but the 
population was probably more sparse and corn less 
extensively grown in the districts where the ears 
reaped were stowed away in holes underground until 
wanted to meet the needs of the day; and when 
Cassar goes on to say that most of those in the 
interior sowed no corn, but lived on flesh and milk, and 
wore skins for their clothing, we have, doubtless, to do 
with statements which were in the main true, though 
one has no means of fixing to a nicety on the tribes 
to which they applied. In making them, he had 
probably nothing to go upon but the vague hearsay 



54 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

reports which may have been current among the 
more civilized people of the south-eastern part of the 
island, with regard to the backward state of some of 
the inhabitants of the remoter regions of the west 
and the north. The same remark applies to Strabo, 
when he states that some knew nothing about 
gardening and other things relating to the farmer's 
life ; but when he mentions that, with abundance of 
milk at their disposal, there were some who were too 
ignorant to make cheese, his statement is at least 
illustrated by the negative evidence involved in the 
Welsh word for cheese, ca7vs, which, like its English 
equivalent, is nothing but the Latin caseus bor- 
]o;\ed. It is somewhat otherwise when Caesar sajs 
that all the Britons painted themselves with woad : 
one could hardly have expected this to have been in 
vogue among the inhabitants of the south-east ; but 
he wrote probably from the evidence of his own 
eyes, so it must be accepted as true even of them. 
After all, it may have meant no more than painting 
the face for battle or certain religious rites, a habit 
not to be confounded with the much more serious 
one of tattooing, which prevailed in parts of the 
north of the island down to a comparatively late 
period. The poet Ovid, of a later date, sings of 
the painted Britons. The custom may be regarded 
as one which once' prevailed very widely. Some 
authors allude to the Agathyrsi and Geloni as 
practising it, others in like manner to Sarmatians 
and Dacians, and Herodotus to the Thracians, 
while Sidonius, Bishop of Clermont in the fifth 



PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 55 

century, graphically describes how some Saxons he 
had seen daubed their faces with blue paint, and 
pushed their hair back to the crown, to make the 
forehead look larger.^ Caesar further tells us that 
the Britons shaved all except the upper lip ; and the 
hair of the head was allowed to grow long. But 
no statement of his has attracted more attention than 
what he says about the morals of the people, to the 
effect that ten or twelve men living together and con- 
sisting especially of brothers or of a father and his sons, 
would have their wives in common, the children being 
reckoned those of the man to whom the maid was 
first given in marriage in each case. So far from this 
having been the custom of the Celts of Britain, it is 
not certain that it can have been to any great extent 
that of any Aryan people whatsoever. If one could 
be sure that this singular statement was not a passage 
from some Greek book of imaginary travels among 
imaginary barbarians, which Caesar had in his mind, 
it would be possible to point out the facts to which 
it bore a kind of relation. In the first place, one 
might suppose that he had heard and misunderstood 
some description of the families of the Britons to 
the effect, that it was usual for ten or twelve men, 
with their wives and children, to live together under 
the patria potestas or power of one father and head, 
a kind of undivided family well known to the student 
of early institutions, and marking a particular stage 

^ See his letter to Lampridius in the 8th book of his 
** Epistles." 



56 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

in the social development of most Aryan nations. 
In the next place it is probable that the Britons 
of the south-east of the island, and some of the Gauls 
of the Continent, had heard of tribes in the remoter 
parts of Britain, whose view of matrimony was not the 
one usual among Aryan nations : this is probably 
the sounder conclusion. 1 A statement, similar to that 
made by Caesar, is mentioned and doubted by Strabo,^ 
but by his time this manner of living had to be sought 
in Ireland, and Dion Cassius,*^ who wrote at the 
beginning of the third century, repeats it of the 
people of Scotland. Later still, it entered into the 
picture drawn, but in a far less hideous form, of the 
pauper King of the Hebrides, by the interpolators ot 
Solinus,'* and it is repeated of the grass-eating commu- 
nity of Thule, where it might have been appropriately 
allowed to drop, but that St. Jerome and others 
thought they had reasons to associate it with the name 
of the Scotti and the Atecotti, which suggests that 
both Britain and Ireland contained down to a 
comparatively late date non-Celtic peoples, who 

' Professor Zimmer on analysing Csesar's statement has no 
doubt that it refers to the non-Aryan inhabitants of Britain, and 
he is probably right : see the "Zeitschrift fur Rechts^eschichte," 
XV., pp. 209, et seq. 

2 Strabo, 5, 4 (C. 201). 

^ See his Roman History (abridged by Xiphilinus), book 
Ixxvi. 12 ; also Ixxvi. 16 for Argentocoxos' wife's well-known 
reply to Julia Augusta, when the latter found fault with British 
morals. 

^ Mommsen's Edition, pp. 234-5, 



PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 57 

were not Celtic or Aryan in their family arrange- 
ments.^ 

The political condition of the people of Brythonic 
Britain towards the end of the early Iron Age and 
the close of their independence, is best studied in _^ 
connection with that of Gaul as described by Caesar. 
The Celts, like all other Aryan nations, were once 
under the rule of kings resembling those of early 
Rome, or those of Greece in the Heroic Age, as 
depicted in Homer's Iliad. This kind of personal 
rule came to an end among various Aryan peoples 
at different times, owing to the action of the chiefs 
subordinate to the king seizing his power and making 
it temporary and elective in their own class. This 
step led the same man to govern and obey in turns, 
and thereby formed no doubt, a very distinct step in 
advance. In this way the kings had been superseded 
in the 7th century before our era, throughout nearly 
the whole of Greece and the Greek Colonies ; - 
and in every instance it was an oligarchy or the 
rule jof a class that rose on the ruins of the 
kingly power; so also at Rome when the Tarquins 
were driven out, practically all power was seized by 
the patricians. A similar revolution, though no 
Gaulish Herodotus or Livy was found to commit it to 
the pages of history, had taken place in Gaul before 
Caesar came there ; but not very long before, since he 
appears to have found almost everywhere the sulking 
and plomng representatives of the fallen dynasties, 
and to have readily turned them to use, either in 

^ See also Stokes's note in the *' Revue Celtique," v. p. 232. 



58 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

bringing him information about what was going on in 
the senates of the peoples who had expelled their ances- 
tors from the office of king, or in keeping their states 
in subjection by appointing them kings in the room 
of their fathers and under Roman protection.^ This 
was notoriously the policy of Rome at all times, and 
it was exceedingly distasteful to most of the Gauls, 
for their detestation of kings was, perhaps, not a whit 
less intense than that of the Romans themselves; 
thus we find^ that the intriguing ^duan, Dumnorix, 
knew of no readier way of filling the ^Eduan senate 
with hatred for Caesar, than by quietly suggesting 
to them that he had been given the office of king 
over them. The punishment fixed by law among 
the Helvetii for trying to secure supreme power 
was that of being burnt alive, and to escape it 
Orgetorix was believed to have committed suicide 
before his trial came on.^ But, though the oligar- 
chical form of government was an advance on the 
old monarchy, it could not, as a rule last long, for 
the very important reason, that it was wont to do 
nothing for the bulk of the people. At Rome, the 
difficulty was solved in a peculiar way, by unwilling 
concessions on the part of the patricians, but in 
Greece the immediate outcome was a plentiful crop 
of despots, who prevailed for a time. The same 
thing had begun to take place in Gaul, although it 
had been foreseen, probably, in every state, and 

^ See, among other passages in point, "Bell. Gal].," i 3; 
iv. 12 ; V. 25, 54. 
2 lb., V. 6. 3 jb,^ i^ 4^ 



PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 59 

Stringently legislated against. The ^dui,^ for in- 
stance, had enacted that neither of the chief magis- 
trates, elected to discharge the office of king for the 
space of a year, could be of the same family as one 
who had previously held the office, in case the 
latter were still alive : they could not even be mem- 
bers of the senate at the same. time. We said jieither 
of them, because Caesar's narrative, supported by the 
evidence of Gaulish coins, proves that the Mdm had 
not one chief magistrate whose office they called 
Te7'gobretos or the administrator of justice, but two,^ 
whose position may be supposed to have been analo- 
gous to that of the consuls at Rome. This dual office, 
which does not seem to have been confined to the 
^dui, survived as the duumvirate for administering 
the law iu the cities of conquered Gaul, and helped 
the Gauls, doubtless, to accommodate themselves to 
the municipal customs of Rome. But the common 
people in Caesar's time continued individually to 
occupy a position which appeared to him to have been 
hardly better than that of slaves, and in order to 

1 " Bell. Gall.," vii. 33. 

^ Cresar's words occur at i. 16, and read in the manuscripts : 
" DiuicJaco et Liico qui summo magistratui proeerant quem 
uergobretum appellant /Edui." The editors, liowevtr, always 
print prczerat, as they find a difficulty, probably, in reconciling 
this passage with Caesar's account of the quarrel mentioned by 
him in vii. 32, 33, where he naust, we think, be supposed to 
have been speaking of the election to only one of the two offices 
— possibly the two were not filled at the same time of the year. 
The question is one originally suggested by M. Mowat in the 
** Reyue Celtique," v. pp. 12 1-4. 



6o CELTIC BRITAIN. 

protect themselves against the tyranny of the more 
powerful members of the community they had to 
become the clients of some influential nobleman, and 
to add themselves to the number of those who were 
tied to him hand and foot by the bonds of debt. The 
condition of these men reminds one of that of the 
bankrupt plebeians of Rome before the secession to 
the Mons Sacer, and in both cases it was probably 
one of the results of the subjugation of a non-Aryan 
population by Aryan invaders. The great man, how- 
ever, lost his influence over his clients the moment he 
failed to protect them. This being so, one is prepared 
for Caesar's further statement that every state was torn 
asunder by factions. Some of the leaders succeeded 
in making themselves masters of their states, and the 
designs of a good many more were cut short by the 
advance of the Roman arms. The despots, as we may 
call them, for the sake of distinguishing them from 
the old kings, appear to have belonged to somewhat 
different stages of political development, the lowest 
being those who adopted the simple plan of hiring 
troops 1 to overpower the senate of the oligarchy : 
there were others who were more wary and showed 
more outward regard for law : these thought it 
needful to enlist the populace on their side, which 
they proceeded to do by eloquence and bribes. 
In fact, there is every reason to suppose that 
the common people were collectively beginning to 
acquire influence, and already, here and there, to 
understand their own power, though they had not 
1 "eell. Gall.,"ii. I, 



PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 6 1 

ks yet taken the initiative. Their temper was the 
first thing to be considered by any adventurous noble- 
man who desired his own advancement; and Ambiorix, 
one of the most powerful Gaulish leaders at the head 
of a formidable alhance opposed to Caesar, once ex- 
cused himself by saying that the multitude had no 
less power over him than he had over them.i Without 
trying to define the capacity of the ancient Gauls for 
political development, we may say that they are seen 
only as it were for a moment, in one of the most critical 
periods in a nation's history. Indeed, the flippant 
generalities formulated about them, from the days of 
Caesar to our own, seldom do them more justice than 
if the independence of Greece had closed with the rise 
of the tyrants, and we based our estimate of the Greek 
character on the little that happens to be known of 
the struggles between the tyrants and the oligarchies. 
Nor is it quite an accident that the nation, descended 
partly from the Gauls, forms at the present moment 
a great and prosperous community, consisting neither 
of the grumbling tenantry of an aristocracy nor of the 
unwilHngly drilled liverymen of a Csesarism. 

The state of things, politically speaking, which 
existed in Gaul, existed also most likely among the 
Belgic tribes in Britain, when Commios (supposing 
the Atrebat of that name to have been the same man 
as the Commios of the British coins) was enabled to 
procure sovereignty for himself in the island and to 
transmit it to his sons. So much may also be 
gathered from the excuse, which the ambassadors, 
1 "Bell. Gall.," V. 27. 



6a CELTIC BRITAIN. 

who came to ask Csesar for peace soon after his 
first landing in Britain, made for having put Com- 
mios in bonds, nanuely, that it was the act of the 
m-ultitude that knew no better. Now, whether it was 
the real cause or not, it is clear that it was a possible 
cause, which might be pleaded by those among whom 
Commios had landed, but not with any show of 
dignity, if we suppose them to have been under the 
rule of a king of the old type, who brooked no med- 
dling on the part of the common people. Here we 
have apparently to do with a people to the east of the 
Belgic tribes, namely, the inhabitants of Caution or 
Kent, among whom Commios and the ambassadors 
returning from Gaul had probably landed. These, 
according to Csesar's account of his second expedi- 
tion, had no less than four kings acting in obedience 
to Cassivellaunos as commander of the organization 
against the Romans : the probability is that not 
one of the four in a country so near Gaul was a 
king of the old description. The same conclusion 
is hkewise indicated by the coins of the Parisi, which 
have already been alluded to, and by those of the 
Catti, which seem to show only the name of the slate, 
as do also some of those of the Eceni, But as the 
most advanced people of Britain were old-fashioned 
enough to paint themselves and to rely so much in 
war on their chariots, it is not surprising to find that 
kings, and those probably of the old sort, were not 
extinct by any means among them. One of the most 
powerful .states was that of the Catuvellauni, who 
may have been too much occupied in war with 



PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 63 

their neighbours to have paid as much attention to 
the form of government under which they lived as 
they might otherwise have done. The Trinovantes 
also had been living under kings, until the last of 
them before Caesar's raids had been slain by Cassi- 
vellaunos. The remaining Brythonic peoples of 
Britain have left the historian no means of making 
out anything definite about their form of govern- 
ment so far as we know ; but it is not improbable 
that the kings and queens of the Brigantes were of 
the old description. 

As to the earlier Celtic inhabitants of the island 
we have no evidence that any of them had got beyond 
the rule of kings of the older kind. The series of the 
old kingships may be supposed to have been com- 
pletely interrupted or profoundly modified in Britain 
by the Roman occupation ; consequently little is to 
be learned as to their nature from that of the king- 
ships which rose after the Roman legions left for 
good. The earlier ones, however, may be presumed 
to have been most likely of the same type as those of 
Ireland, where the series were never broken by Roman 
rule. As among the Greeks the king of the ancient 
Irish legends may be said to have reigned by divine 
right and by divine favour, so he must not be dis- 
figured by any blemish^ or have lost a limb. The 
mythical Irish King (in reality, perhaps, the Celtic 
sea-god) Nuada, said to have had his hand cut off' 
in battle, was, we are told, compelled to resign 

^ Seethe " Senchus Mor," i. 73 



64 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

his office until a western y^isculapius provided 
him with a wonderful hand of silver with motion in 
every finger. Moreover as the man who criticised 
the kings before Troy was found to be the ugly 
Thersites, so the usurper of the power of the rightful 
king in Irish legend is sometimes described as a 
cat-headed monster with the displeasure of Heaven 
attending on his footsteps : the land in his time 
yields no corn, the trees no fruit, the rivers no fish, 
the cows no milk. When, however, the rightful king 
that is to say, the king of the right stock, recovers his 
power, the seasons become tranquil, the cows give 
milk in abundance, the earth is fruitful, the rivers 
teem with fish, and the trees bend heavy-laden under 
their crop of fruit. ^ The Goidels of Britain entertained 
the same opinion : we catch a glimpse of it among 
the descendants of the ancient Silures as late as the 
1 2th century in the belief recorded by Giraldus, that 
the birds of the lake of Savaddon, near Brecon, 
would all begin to sing at the bidding of the rightful 
prince of Wales : the story relates how Griffith son 
of Rhys got them to warble and to beat the water 
with their wings for sheer loyalty after refusing to 
obey the Norman barons, who were then masters 
both of Griffith's person and of his land.^ A king 
of the old sort was responsible to nobody, but he 

' See " The Four Masters' Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland," 
A.M. 3303, 3310, 331 1; AD. 14, 15, 76; also the " Senchus 
Mor," iii. 24, 25. 

2 Giraldus's " Itinerarium Kambrias," I. ii. (p. 34 of the Rolls 
Editicn). 



PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 65 

usually consulted the chiefs beneath him (who, in 
Gaul, survived the kingship to form the senate 
under the oligarchy in their respective states), and 
when he had discussed his views with them he 
declared his plans to a larger assembly and published 
his decrees by means of it. " In this government," 
says Mr. Grote,^ speaking of the Greek king as de- 
scribed in epic poetry, " the authority, which pervades 
the whole society, all resides in the king. But on 
important occasions it is exercised through the forms 
of publicity; he consults, and even discusses, with the 
councils of chiefs or elders — he communicates after 
such consultation with the assembled Agora, — who 
hear and approve, perhaps hear and murmur, but are 
not understood to exercise an option or to reject." 
This would all apply to ancient Ireland if only for the 
Greek Agora or the market place we substitute the 
Irish Aenach or the fair ; and presumably also to the 
Goidelic portions of Britain generally about the time 
we are speaking of. The old idea of kings and gods 
probably placed them on somewhat parallel lines, 
and, as there were gods and goddesses, so there were 
royal persons of both sexes. In the case of the 
ancient Gauls this is indicated by the fact that the 
Gauhsh word rix entered into the composition of 
names not only of men as Orgetorix and Dumnorix, 
but also of women as Visurix and Biturix. It is 
etymologically the same vocable as the Latin rex, 
king, which may possibly have also once been epicene, 

^ "History of Greece" (the ed. of 1862), ii. 223; see also 
i. 457, 461. 



66 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

custom having in the long run ruled in favour of calling 
a king's wife a regina or royal person of the female sex. 
The old Irish H, genitive rig^ king, and rigan, queen, 
would be somewhat analogous, though the Welsh 
rhian, the equivalent of the Irish rigan, differs in being 
mostly a poetic term for a lady, who need not be royal. 
Whether most of the king-ruled Belgo-Brythons of 
Britain were so far rid of the patriarchal idea of 
monarchy as to let a woman exercise the power of 
king is not certain: the history of Boudicca, queen 
of the Eceni and widow of a king given them probably 
by the Romans, does not prove the point: still less 
decisive is the case of Cartismandua, queen of the 
Brigantes, who is described as married or re-marrying. 
There is, however, no reason to think that among the 
older Celtic peoples of Britain a woman could hold 
supreme power either in the state or in the family. 
But as the old kingly rule was above all things mainly 
a large type edition of the power of a father over his 
household, and as the wife probably occupied a place 
of authority and respect by his side, so the queen 
may be supposed to have been similarly placed with 
regard to the king : the system would have been 
regarded as incomplete without her, whether we 
have in view Britain or the sister island. We have 
an illustration of this in a very curious Irish tale 
which relates how a king of ancient Erin was 
compelled to marry because the magnates of his 
realm with one accord flatly refused to hold the 
great periodical feast of Tara under the presidency of 
a king who had no wife; so he was obliged to 



PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 67 

marry.i And as to personal rule altogether, nothing, 
perhaps, illustrates more compendiously and clearly 
the difference between the Brythons and the Goidels 
than the history of an early Celtic word meaning 
power or authority, which has yielded the Welsh their 
gwlad in the sense of the state or the country, while 
in Irish it has taken the form oiflaith, which means a 
lord or prince : the signification had begun to set 
strongly in that direction as early at least as the tenth 
century. 

Exceedingly little is said by ancient authors about 
the religion of the people of Britain. There is, how- 
ever, no reason to suppose that, in so far as they were 
Celts, they had not the same sort of religion as the 
Gauls and the Italians, or the Greeks, and other Aryan 
nations. Csesar found the Gauls given to the worship 
of gods, whom he roughly identified with those of 
Rome, namely, Jove and Minerva, Apollo and Mars 
and, above all, Mercury, whom they honoured more 
than the others. Much the same gods were probably 
worshipped by the Celts in Britain ; and among them 
was the sea-god Nodens (in Irish Nuada), who was of 
sufficient importance, during the Roman occupation, to 
have a temple built for him at Lydney on the western 
side of the Severn, while the Irish formerly called the 
goddess of the Boyne Nuada Necht's wife.^ Every 
locality had its divinity, and the rivers were identified 

1 See Windisch's " Irische Texte," pp. 118, &c. 

2 See O'Curry's "Manners and Cust. of the Anc. Irish," iii. 
p. 156, and a remarkable passage in the Book of Leinster, fol. 
1866. 

F 2 



6B CELTIC BRITAIN. 

with certain divine beings : witness the streams that 
still bear the name of Dee and kindred ones. The 
Dee or Deva of North Wales had another name, 
which appears in Welsh literature as A erven or the 
genius of war ; and so late as the time of Giraldus it 
retained some of its ancient prestige : it was still 
supposed to indicate beforehand the event of the 
frequent wars between the Welsh and the English by 
eating away its bank on the Welsh or on the English 
side, as the case might be. The name of another 
river marks it out as one that was formerly considered 
divine, the Belisama, probably our Mersey : the name 
occurs in inscriptions found in Gaul as that of a god- 
dess equated with the Minerva of Italy.^ And, like 
the Greeks and the Romans, the Britons personified 
diseases, as may be gathered from the fact that in a 
part of Mid-Wales the ague is still known by the name 
of Y JVrac/i or Vr hen Wrach^ that is, the Hag, or 
the old Hag, and from the tradition that Maelgwn, of 
whom we shall have occasion to speak again, died of 
the Fad Felen, or Yellow Death, which is described 
as a strange figure with teeth, eyes, and hair all 
golden, coming from a neighbouring marsh and 
fixing her baleful gaze on him in a church he had 
entered.^ This was an elastic system of polytheism, 

^ See Orelli, Nos. 143 1, 1969, and de Belloguet's ** Ethno- 
genie Gauloise," i. p. 375: she is detected also at Carleon on 
the Usk : see Lee's " Isca Sihirum," p. 19. 

2 See " the Myvyr'an Ai ch. of Wales," i. 27 ; Pennant's " Tourg 
in Wales,' iii. p. 138; and the " Cymmrodor," v. p. 167, 



PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 69 

or perhaps, more strictly speaking, not a system at 
all ; and possibly the priesthood it implied did not 
form a class distinctly marked off from other men ; 
but we have no data, so we must pass on to the non- 
Celtic natives, who had another religion, namely, 
druidism, which may be surmised to have had its ■''' 
origin among them. Druidism possessed certain 
characteristics which enabled it to make terms with 
the Celtic conqueror, both in Gaul and in the British 
Islands. A somewhat analogous case was that of the 
Magi in the East, and that of the non- Aryan peoples 
of Scandinavia, where the word for a Finn or Lapp is 
synonymous in Old Norse with that for a sorcerer.^ 
Whatever else druidism as a system may have been, 
magic doubtless constituted one of its most important 
elements in this country, and the chief means of 
enabling it to hold its own ; for the well-known 
tendency of higher races to ascribe magical powers to 
lower ones serves, so far as it goes, to make the posi- 
tion of the latter more tolerable than it would 
otherwise have been in respect of the treatment dealt 
to them by their more powerful neighbours.^ The 
Goidelic Celts appear to have accepted druidism, but / 
there is no evidence that it ever was the religion of 
any Brythonic people. 

'See Vigfusson's " Icelandic Diet." s. v. Finnar ; also 
Milton's "Par. Lost," ii. 665. 

^ The whole question has been treated at length by Dr. Tylor 
in his work on "Primitive Culture," i. pp. 112-117, where a 
variety of instances are brought together from different parts of 
the world. 



70 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

Thus the men of Britain might perhaps be 
classified, so far as regards religion, into three 
groups : the Brythonic Celts, who were polytheists 
of the Aryan type ; the non-Celtic natives under 
the sway of druidism ; and the Goidelic Celts, 
devotees of a religion which combined Aryan poly- 
theism with druidism : here again data are wanting, 
and one is at a loss to know what people Pliny ^ 
had in view when he wrote that the wives and 
daughters-in-law of the Britons attended certain reh- 
gious rites without their clothing, and with their 
bodies painted black as if in imitation of Ethiopians. 
Nor have ancient authors told us much about their 
most influential order of men, the druids, excepting 
those of Mona, who witnessed the landing in their 
island of Suetonius and his troops : these, Tacitus 
gives one to understand,'^ stained their altars with the 
blood of human beings, sought auguries in the entrails 
of their victims, and practised some, at least, of their 
cruel rites in groves which the Romans proceeded to 
cut down. Something is also to be learnt from the 
use made of the words for druid in the Celtic 
literatures of later times. Among the oldest instances 
in Welsh poetry ^ of the use of the word derwyddon, 
druids, is one where it is applied to the Magi or 
Wise Men, who came with presents to the infant 
Jesus, and its Irish cognate drui was not only used in 

' "Hist. Nat.,"xxii. i (2). 
^ "Ann.," xiv. 29, 30. 

^ See an obscure poem in the Book of Taliessin in Skene's 
•* Four Ancient Books of Wales," vol. ii. p. 174. 



PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 7 1 

the same manner, but was usually rendered into Latin 
by magus^ a magician. Now and then also, point is 
given to this term by giving the druid the name of 
Simon Magus, whose appearance on Celtic ground is 
otherwise inexplicable. The Goidelic druids accord- 
ingly appear at times under the name of the School 
of Simon Druid : ^ they were soothsayers, priests, and 
medicine men, but their principal character was, per- 
haps, that of magicians. Thus the lives of St. Patrick 
describe the druids of the king of Ireland striving to 
surpass that saint in working miracles : among other 
things, one of them causes snow to fall so thickly that 
men quickly find themselves neck-deep in it : at 
another time he brings over the plain darkness that 
might be felt, so that all trembled with fear. But, 
like Moses with Pharaoh's magicians, Patrick always 
has the best of it. Indeed, so completely did the 
Irish recognise the similarity between their magicians 
and those of the Nile, that a writer of glosses on a 
ninth century manuscript of St. Paul's Epistles 
explains to the Irish reader that Jannes and Jambres/ 
were the names of two Egyptian druid s.^ The same 
was probably the character of the druids of Britain ; it 
certainly was that of those at the non-Celtic court of 
the Pictish king in the sixth century. A life of St. 
Columba, written in the seventh century, mentions 

^ A curious passage about Simon drui and his School, kindly 
pointed out to the writer by Dr. Stokes, occurs in O'MuIconrys' 
Glossary in MS. H. 2, 16 (col. 116) in Trin. Coll. Library, 
Dublin. See also Reeves's " Adamnan," p. xlvii. 

2 **Glossce Hibernica," ed. Zimmer, p. 183. 



72 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

the saint's contests with one of those wizards of the 
North, who is described as bringing on thick dark- 
ness and a great fury of the elements just at the 
time when he found the saint setting sail on Loch 
Ness.i Nor is it quite certain that the notion of a 
druid as magician was not the one uppermost in the 
mind of the fervent writer of an ancient hymn 
ascribed to St. Columba, who is therein made to say : 
Christ the son of God is my druid.^ Such being the 
character of the druids in the north of the island in the 
sixth century, we may suppose that among the Goidels 
of the more southern parts they were much the same 
about the time of Caesar's invasions, namely, a power- 
ful class of men monopolising the influence of sooth- 
sayers, magicians, and priests. In Gaul, under the 
faint rays of the civilization of Marseilles and other 
Mediterranean centres, they seem to have added to 
their other characters that of philosophers discoursing 
to the youths whose education was entrusted to 
them, on the stars and their movements, on the 
world and its countries, on the nature of things and 
the power of the gods. The same influence had also 
probably been operating to soften and moderate the 
pristine grimness of their practices, and this may be 
supposed to have been the reason why Gaulish 
students came to this country to perfect themselves in 
the druidic system. Here in the western parts of the 
island it still retained, perhaps, its most rugged and 
horrible features unmodified by the Aryan ideas which 

^ Reeves's * Adamnan's Life of St. Columba," p; 149. 
2 Ibid,, p, 74. 



PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 73 

may have been telling more forcibly on it in Gaul. 
It is hard, however, to accept the belief, recorded by 
Csesar, that druidism originated here, and was only 
imported into Gaul : the probability rather is that the 
Celts found it both there and here the common 
religion of some of the aboriginal inhabitants of the 
west of Europe. 

Some of the customs of the pagans of these islands 
may be detected in the observances of their Christian 
descendants : thus among many nations a mild form 
of mutilation is found to have been the symbol of 
slavery, and the minimum consisted not unfrequently 
in cutting off some of the hair of the head. Among 
the Brythons we find in the Welsh romances called 
the Mabinogion a youth, who wished to become one 
of Arthur's knights, having his hair cut ^ off by the 
king with his own hand, but this practice is now best 
known in the Roman church, where the priest, literally 
regarded as a servus dei or God's slave, has his crown 
shaven. The Celtic languages bear ample evidence 
to the same idea among the Celts : thus, the Welsh 
word for a hermit, which is meudwy, means God's 
slave, and such an Irish name as Maelpad?aic 
signifies the bald or tonsured slave of Patrick, and 
is found Latinized into Calvus Patricii^ in the ninth 
century. The tonsure usual in Britain and Ireland 
was the same, and was merely a druidic survival, so, 
when the Church of Rome insisted on the Chris- 
tians of these islands conforming more completely to 

^ Guest's " Mabinogion," ii. 204 : it is mistranslated at p. 258. 

^ Nigra's " Reliquie Celtiche," p. 19. 



74 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

its practices, the druidic tonsure was one of the 
differences which it wished to be rid of. The Irish 
Church began to conform in this matter of hair-cutting 
in the year 630, while the British Church held out till 
768. There is an exceedingly curious, though some- 
what confused, passage in the Second Epistle of Gildas, 
possibly not a part of the original, but written, at any 
rate, before the druidic tonsure had disappeared : it 
is to the following efiect^ : — "The Britons, contrary 
to all the world, and hostile to Roman customs not 
only in the mass but also in the tonsure, are, with the 
Jews, slaves to the shadow of things to come rather 
than to the truth. The Romans say that the tonsure 
of the Britons is reported to have originated with 
Simon Magus, whose tonsure embraced merely the 
whole front part of the head from ear to ear, in order 
to exclude the genuine tonsure of the Magi, whereby 
the front part alone was wont to be covered. But the 
originator of this tonsure in Ireland is proved by 
Patrick's discourse to have been the swineherd of 
king Loigaire MacNeill, from whom nearly all the 
Irish adopted it." The man meant by Loigaire's swine- 
herd (a mis-translation of mocu) was Dubthach mocu 
Lugir, who was chief poet of Ireland, at the head 
of a large number of pupils : the legend relating 
ho\v Patrick sought the " materials of a bishop " 
among his pupils, throws some light on the meaning 

1 Haddan and Stubbs' "Councils and Eccl. Doc," i. pp. 
112-3 : see Mommsen's "Chronica Minora Saec, IV., V., VI.^ 
VII. (in the Monumenta Germanice Historica), iii. p. 88, and 
Bede's ''Hist. Eccl.," v. 21. 



PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 75 

of the tonsure among the Celts : — " Find for me," 
said Patrick, "a man of rank, of good family, and 
good morals, one who has one wife and only one 
son." — "Why," said Dubthach, " askest ihou that, 
for a man of that sort ? " — " To put orders on him," 
said Patrick. — " Fiacc is the man," said Dubthach : 
"he is gone on a circuit in Connaught." Just 
while this conversation is going on Fiacc returns 
from his circuit, and Dubthach says, " Here is he 
of whom we spoke." — " Be it so," said Patrick ; 
" but suppose that what we said were not pleasing to 
him." — " Let preparation be made," said Dubthach, 
" for tonsuring me, while Fiacc is looking on." 
Now, as soon as Fiacc saw that, he asked what 
they were preparing to do. " To tonsure Dubthach," 
said they. — " That is idle," said Fiacc, " for there 
is no poet equal to him in Erin." — " Thou wouldst 
be accepted in his stead ? " said Patrick — " The loss 
of me to Erin," said Fiacc, " is less than that of 
Dubthach." So Patrick shore his beard then from 
Fiacc, and great grace came upon him thereafter . . . 
so that a bishop's rank was conferred on him, and so 
that he is archbishop of Leinster thenceforward, and 
his successor after him."^ A great deal more might 
be said on this subject of early Celtic religion ; but, 
as it is a matter of inference rather than of history, it 
would take up too much of our space to speak of it at 
length j some points, however, connected with it will 
again come under the reader's notice as we go on. 

^ The original, of which th^'s is a free rendering, will be found 
in Stokes's " Goidelica," p. 126, and a shorter version at p. 86, 



76 CELTIC BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE ROMANS IN BRITAIN, AND HOW THEY LEFT IT. 

The first part of this chapter will be devoted to the 
successive steps taken by the Romans to bring the 
island into subjection, as well as to the principal 
events of the Roman occupation ; but only so far 
as it tends to throw light on the position of the 
peoples living here and their relations to one 
another, since the Roman administration of the 
government of Britain is to be treated at length in 
another volume of this series. 

For nearly a century after Caesar's last invasion no 
attempt was made to bring Britain under real subjec- 
tion to Rome, but his expeditions had the effect of 
bringing it into a sort of connection with the Roman 
world, the influence of which we have already pointed 
out. In the year 43 Claudius Caesar resolved to 
send Aulus Plautius with an army to conquer the 
island. The same political changes seem to have 
been then going on here, which Julius Caesar 
found at work in Gaul years before, and it is hinted 
that the nominal connection between Britain and 
Rome was in danger, owing to exiles from the island 
being sheltered and protected by Claudius Caesar. 
To these we may suppose Bericos, mentioned in 



UNDER THE ROMANS. 77 

the previous chapter, to have belonged. He used 
his influence to induce Claudius to invade the island, 
a course which seems to have readily recommended 
itself to the emperor, who happened to be anxious 
to find an excuse for enjoying a triumph at Rome. 
The Roman general is supposed to have landed with- 
out opposition, but where it is hard to say. One of 
the last views published on the subject is that of Dr. 
Hiibner,! who would bring him along the path of the 
Belg^ to the neighbourhood of Southampton, and 
make him then march northwards to Winchester and 
Silchester in quest of the enemy. The first mention 
of an engagement is that of one in which Dion Cassius^ 
tells us that Plautius defeated Caratacos and Togo- 
dumnos, the sons of Cunobelinos, who had died not 
long before. Togodumnos was probably king in the 
place of his father, with Caratacos ruling over the 
western portion of the territory over which the Catu- 
vellauni held sway : it was in this district probably that 
they were defeated ; and their flight resulted in bringing 
the Dobunni who were subject to the Catuvellauni 
into submission ; and a Roman force was left among 
them. Then we read of a series of engagements 
extending over two days, in which the Britons offered 
stout resistance to the advance of the Romans, but 
owing greatly to the skill and bravery of Vespasian, 
who had been sent over to be the general's lieutenant, 
the invaders ultimately proved victorious, though the 

^ See his elaborate article entitled " Das Romische Heer in 
Britannien," Hermes, xvi. p. 527. 

-2 " Roman Hist.," Ix. 20, 21. 



78 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

British charioteers had selected positions of great 
strength near a deep river, which the GauHsh auxiliaries 
were the first to cross : they succeeded in wounding 
the chariot horses of the enemy and in otherwise 
giving much trouble. Whether that river was the 
Thames or not, we next read of the native army 
being south of the tidal portion of the latter, and escap- 
ing from the Roman legions by crossing it. The 
Gauls swam across as readily as their insular kins- 
men had done, while the Romans crossed higher 
up the stream by means of a bridge. They gained 
some advantages over the native forces, but pressing 
forward too rashly they lost many of their men, 
while the fall of Togodumnos had the effect of com- 
bining his people to avenge his death. Plautius 
now takes steps to secure the part of the country 
he has conquered, and advances no farther, but 
sends word to the emperor in accordance with the 
instructions he has received. The latter accord- 
ingly comes in person, and finds the Roman legions 
awaiting him near the Thames. He crossed the 
river and took Camulodunon, which had been the 
capital of CunobeHnos. Then followed the sub- 
mission of several tribes, and Claudius, after spend- 
ing sixteen days in the island, hastened to Rome 
to enjoy his triumph, and to amuse the Romans 
with spectacles in which Britain was represented. 
The operations here up to the time of the em- 
peror's departure resulted in bringing the Catu- 
vellauni and the States dependent on them under 
Roman rule, together with the district between the 



UNDER THE ROMANS. 79 

Thames and the coast, from the mouth of that 
river to the neighbourhood of the Isle of Wight. 
Within this area Rome soon found a princely 
tool called king Cogidumnos, who had certain 
cities given him, and who, Tacitus^ tells us, con- 
tinued faithful to his imperial masters for many 
years afterwards. It is not merely an accidental 
coincidence, perhaps, that an inscription^ has been 
found at Chichester, mentioning a king of that name. 
He may have been the man or a descendant of his, 
and his subjects may have been the Regni, who in- 
habited what is now Sussex. Plautius was left in 
Britain with orders to carry on the work of conquest, 
but he appears at Rome in the year 47, to receive 
an ovation for having managed the war with ability. 
Several historians dwell also on the deeds of Ves- 
pasian, who, as they assert, engaged the enemy no 
less than thirty times both under Plautius and the 
emperor. He also reduced the two most powerful 
peoples of Britain, together with more than twenty 
towns and the Isle of Wight.'*^ His son Titus like- 
wise served here, and is mentioned as having once 
rescued his father when hemmed in by the enemy 
on all sides. Who the two most powerful peoples 
of Britain subdued by Vespasian may have been 
we are not told, but they were most likely the 
Belgae and the Dumnonii, who occupied nearly the 
whole of the south-west of the island, including the 

^ "Agricola," 14. 

■^ The Berlin " Corpus Insc. Lat," vol. vii. no. 11. 

•^ Suetonius, "Vespasian," chap. 4, 



8o CELTIC BRITAIN. 

tin districts, which cannot have escaped the attention 
of the Romans, whose operations are spoken of as 
having, by the time of the departure of Plautius, made 
Britain emphatically a part of the Roman empire. 
According to Tacitus, the principal authority on the 
liter Roman conquests in Britain, the command of 
the legions here was given to Ostorius in the year 50. 
He at once adopted active measures against the 
tribes who were openly defiant, disarmed those whom 
he suspected of being disaffected, and prepared to 
keep in check all those who dwelt on his side of the 
Severn and the Trent,i which rivers may be taken 
as marking the boundary of the province at the time. 
Possibly the building of Vriconion or Wroxeter, near 
Shrewsbury, is to be traced to Ostorius's policy, and 
perhaps we may assume that it marked on the Severn 
the farthest corner of the tract of country which 
had then been conquered by Roman arms. Among 
other consequences of his policy may be reckoned 
the revolt of the powerful people of the Eceni, who 
had hitherto accepted the alliance of the Romans 
and escaped the bitter consequences of war. They 
now succeeded in persuading the neighbouring states 
to join them, and chose a strong position, which they 
fortified in a skilful fashion and afterwards defended 

1 This is the meaning of a passage in the " Annals," xii. 31, 
where Dr. Henry Bradley happily conjectured (the Academy^ 
April 28, 1883, p. 296) that we should read, cimctosque cis 
Trisantonam et Sahrinam fiuvios cohibere far at. He seems to 
be also right in regarding Trisaniona as the early form of the 
name which became Tre(h)anta, Trenta, now Trent. 



UNDER The ROMANS. 8 1 

with great valour, but in vain. After humbling the 
Ecenij Ostorius led his men across the island until 
they reached a point not far from the sea which looks 
towards Ireland, in the territory of a people called, 
according to the best conjecture, the Deceangli,i who 
may have inhabited Cheshire, or more probably the 
part of North Wales between the Dee and the Clwyd. 
The Deceangli did not face the legions in the open 
field, but they harassed their plundering parties, and 
were at length rid of them, for news of discord among 
the Brigantes induced the general to lead his men 
away in that direction. The relation in which the 
Brigantes stood to the Romans at this time is a matter 
of uncertainty, but they were possibly allies of some 
kind. With a view both to overawing the conquered 
tribes in the east of the island, and to having a 
reserve to fall back upon, Ostorius established a 
strong colony of veterans at Camulodunon. 

The Silures now come to the front as a people whom 
neither severity nor clemency could induce to put up 
with Roman rule. They occupied the eastern half of 
the country between the lower course of the Severn 
and Cardigan Bay, the rest of that tract being the land 
of the Demetse. The middle of Wales, north of these 
peoples, was occupied by the powerful state of the 
Ordovices, who probably belonged to the later Celtic 
settlers of Brythonic origin, while the Silures and 
Demet^ were presumably .of the earlier Celts, and 
also represented by assimilation and absorption 
whatever non-Celtic tribes had managed to remain in 
^ Tacitus, "Ann.," xii. 33. 

G 



82 CELTiC BRITAIN. 

that part of the country. The Silufes were les§ 
civilised than the Brythons to the east of them, but 
they were also more intrepid and indomitable ; their 
territory probably bordered on a portion of the 
country which had been under the rule of Cunobelinos's 
son, Caratacos : we find him, after resisting the 
Roman arms for nearly nine years with various results, 
which gave him pre-eminence over all other native 
leaders, actively engaged among the Silures, to whom 
he may be supposed to have brought superior skill in 
the operations of war, and in whom he found braver 
warriors than in his own land. The sequel is so well 
known that we need not give Tacitus' account^ in detail 
as to how he led his forces into the country of the 
Ordovices, how he chose an advantageous position and 
fought bravely but unsuccessfully against Ostorius, how 
he escaped to the Brigantes and was given up to the 
Romans by their queen Cartismandua, and how his 
manly bearing struck the Romans and obtained for 
him and his family the emperor's pardon, guilty as he 
was of the crime of fighting for his own. It is hard to 
say at what point in Caratacos's career the coin reading 
CARAT or CARx\" was struck, but it was probably 
his. 

While the idlers of Rome crowded to behold the 
man who had defied the legions for so many years, and 
the senators compared Ostorius's victory to the most 
remarkable successes of Roman generals in previous 
ages, Ostorius found that he had by no means- 

1 Tacitus, " Ann.," xii. 33-7. / 

2 Evans's " Coins of the Anc. Britons," p. 552, pi. xx. 8. 



UNDER THE ROMANS. 83 

done with the Silures ; for we read of them very 
soon afterwards inflicting severe losses on the 
forces left in their country. So persistent did 
they prove in their opposition to Roman rule, 
that there was a talk for a time that they 
were all to be cut off; but in the meanwhile Ostorius 
died, and his enemies boasted that, though he was 
not slain in battle, it was the worry of the war that 
killed him. His successor, Aulus Didius, personally 
took no very active part in the operations; but he had 
to deal not only with the Silures, but also with the 
Brigantes, whose king, Venutios, was the most able 
native leader since Caratacos had been taken. The 
former had been faithful to the Romans for some 
time, but a disagreement with the queen, Cartis- 
mandua, who was his wife,^ but preferred his armour- 
bearer, brought him into collision with the Romans, 
who interfered successfully to save the queen from 
Venutios ; nevertheless, their victory led to nothing 
further. Didius was followed in command by 
Veranius in 57, but he died the next year without 
having effected anything except ravaging the land of 
the Silures. 

Nothing had been done since Ostorius's death to ex- 
tend the Roman conquests, until Suetonius Paulinus, 
whom Nero sent here in 58, led the legions into 
Mona or Anglesey, which is described as being a 
receptacle for fugitives. He ordered flat-bottomed 
boats to be got ready, in which the foot soldiers 
were carried across the Menai, and the following is 

1 "Ann ,"xii. 36, 40; " Hist.,"iii. 45. 
G 2 



84 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

the account which Tacitus^ gives of the scene : — " On 
the shore stood the forces of the enemy, a dense 
array of arms and men, with women dashing through 
the ranks Hke the furies ; their dress was funereal, 
their hair dishevelled, and they carried torches in 
their hands. The Druids round the host, pouring 
forth dire imprecations, with their hands uplifted 
towards the heavens, struck terror into the soldiers 
by the strangeness of the sight ; insomuch that, as 
if their limbs were paralysed, they exposed their 
bodies to the weapons of the enemy without attempt- 
ing to move. Afterwards, at the earnest exhortations 
of the general, and from the effect of their own mutual 
importunities that they would not be scared by a 
rabble of women and fanatics, they bore down upon 
them, smote all that opposed them to the earth, and 
wrapped them in the flames they had themselves 
kindled. A garrison was then established to over- 
awe the vanquished, and the groves dedicated to 
sanguinary superstitions destroyed; for they deemed 
t a duty to their deities to cover their altars with the 
blood of captives, and to seek the will of the gods in 
the entrails of men." 

While Suetonius was thus occupied in Mona,^ news 
reached him that the rest of the province, left de- 
nuded of troops, was in revolt. It was headed by Bou- 
dicca, the widow-queen of the Eceni, whose husband, 
Prasutagos, had probably been set over that people 
after their unsuccessful rebellion some eight years pre- 
viously. Prasutagos, w^ho was known for his opulence, 
1 " Annales," xiv. 29, 30, ^ Ann. xiv. 30, &c. 



UNDER THE ROMANS. 85 

had thought it prudent for the safety of his family to 
make the emperor joint heir with his own daughters 
to his wealth. The Roman officials, however, re- 
garded this as an excuse to treat his goods as the 
spoils of war : the queen was flogged, her daughters 
were ravished, and the chief Ecenians were treated 
as slaves. Boudicca, who would not quietly suffer, 
organized a revolt, which was joined by other tribes, 
and especially by the Trinovantes, who were robbed 
of their land by the colony established at Camulo- 
dunon. The result is well known : some 70,000 
Romans were killed by the enraged Britons, and 
Suetonius is supposed to have retaliated by killing 
80,000 of the natives, when he returned. 

There is not much to record about Britain till 
Vespasian, who was well acquainted with it, seized 
on the Roman empire in the year 69 ; he succes- 
sively sent here at least three great generals, the 
first being Petilius Cerealis, who effected the reduc- 
tion of the Brigantes in the years 69 and 70 : they 
were reputed, Tacitus^ tells us, to have formed the 
most populous state in the island (or the province, as 
the Romans were now in the habit of calling it), and 
their subjection was brought about only after many 
battles had been fought, some of which were attended 
with great bloodshed. His successor was Julius 
Frontinus, who undertook the task of subduing the 
Silures : this, in spite of the bravery of that people, 
and the difficult nature of their country, he ac- 
complished not long probably before the advent 
^ "Agricola," ch. 17, &c. 



86 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

in 78 of Vespasian's third great general, Julius 
\/ Agricola. It is, however, very remarkable that 
this people should have been able to resist the 
Roman arms with more or less success for so many 
years, and it may be regarded as certain that a very 
considerable force was left to occupy their country ; 
for afterwards the second Augustan legion is found 
permanently posted at Isca Siluruni^ called later 
Caerleon (or the Camp of the Legion) on the Usk, 
a little above the present town of Newport, a site 
well known on account of its Roman remains, and 
among them a good number of inscriptions. It was 
the middle of the summer of 78 when Agricola 
rrrived, and the soldiers were already thinking of 
their winter quarters, although a considerable body of 
Roman cavalry had not long before been cut off by 
the Ordovices, on whose frontiers they were stationed, 
and a great many of the natives were halting between 
peace and war. Agricola quickly set out into the 
territory of the Ordovices, and inflicted on them such 
losses in this short war, that according to Tacitus^ it 
resulted almost in the total extirpation of that people; 
but the statement is proved to have been an exaggera- 
tion, both by their subsequent history and the extent 
of the wild country they occupied. This included 
• the district north of the Silures and the Demetse, a 
portion of the adjacent counties of England, to- 
gether with North Wales, except, roughly speaking, 
the north-west corner within the basins of the 
Clwyd and the Mawddach, which, with Mona, still 
1 "Agricola," ch. 18, &c. 



UNDER THE ROMANS. 87 

belonged, it may be supposed, to the earlier Celtic 
settlers of the Goidelic branch, for there are reasons 
to think that the Ordovices who had thus reached 
the sea on the west formed the vanguard of the 
Brythonic invasion. As regards the Romans, the 
Ordovices and the Goidels in their rear usually acted 
together against them, and when the legions attacked 
the Ordovices they seem to have considered Mona as 
their goal, and so they did in this case. For Agricola, 
after crushing the Ordovices, pushed on until he 
came to the shore of the Menai ; but the islanders, 
seeing that he had no vessels, thought they were 
safe. They were, however, soon convinced of their 
mistake ; for the auxiliary troops, who were probably 
Gauls or natives of the low country near the mouth 
of the Rhine, suddenly plunged into the channel 
and safely swam across. The surrender of the 
island followed, and Agricola turned his attention to 
suppressing the abuses w^hich made Roman rule -so 
unbearable to the Britons, a policy attended with 
such success that the natives began to adopt Roman 
habits and customs and eventually set themselves to 
learn Latin. ^ 

The army had been employed in the summer of 79 
in harassing the natives who still held out, and it 
was not till the summer of the year 80 that Agricola 
undertook to extend the province towards the north. 
The lands of some of the Brigantian tribes were 
then overrun and fortresses erected in their midst, 
where the Roman troops, having been provided with 
1 Tacilus, " Agticola," c. 21. 



8S CELTIC BRITAIN. 

a year's provisions, passed the winter. That, or the 
year after, was probably the time when a legion 
was first settled at Eburacon, or York.i Agricola's 
fourth summer in command, that of 8i, was spent 
in securing the possession of these northern acquisi- 
tions, which were now to be bounded by the Forth 
and the Clyde, the neck of land between the estuaries 
of those rivers being defended by a chain of forts. In 
his fifth campaign Agricola directed his attention to 
the districts opposite Ireland, by which Galloway was 
possibly meant. This he did, not because he had any 
fear from that quarter, but because he had a wish to 
conquer Ireland, for which a single legion with a few 
auxiliaries would have, he thought, sufficed. With 
that view he kept in readiness an Irish king w^ho 
had been obliged to flee his own country. His sixth 
campaign, the year following, was directed against 
the tribes beyond the Forth, and the fleet sent out to 
explore the harbours of the north, acting in con- 
cert with the army, is said to have struck fear into 
the northern populations, that they should now 
be cut off from the last refuge of the vanquished, 
the secret retreats of their seas. This was learned 
from captives, and it shows that even then the natives 
of the north knew how to turn their numerous lochs 
and creeks to use. They gathered courage enough 
to act on the offensive, but in the general engage- 
ment which ensued they were worsted, and the 
Roman soldiers now wanted to advance into the 
heart of the country which Tacitus calls Caledonia. 
^ See Hubner, " Hermes," xvi. p, 543- 



UNDER THE ROMANS. 89 

The Caledonians, however, far from being cowed, 
determined, by sinking their mutual jealousies, to 
oppose a united front to the invader the summer 
following— that is, in 85. Agricola sent his fleet to 
create fear and alarm along the coast, and marched 
his army as far as the Tay, at the meeting of which 
with the Isla, he is supposed to have found the 
Caledonians encamped to the number of 30,000 
men. Their leader was one Calgacos, whom Tacitus 
describes as haranguing his countrymen in the most 
eloquent terms: Agricola is made to do the same 
with the legions, and then a terrible battle began, 
in which the historian asserts that the Caledonians 
lost one-third of their number. Among other things, 
he tells us that the natives were provided with short 
targets and long, pointless swords, which were useless 
in the thick of the fight, and that the chariots helped 
to increase the confusion into which they fell. This 
battle, in 86, is known as that of Mons Granpius or 
Graupius ; and when it had been won Agricola led 
his troops into the country of the Boresti, situated 
somewhere between the Firths of Tay and Forth. He 
took hostages from the Boresti, and proceeded to 
winter quarters, probably south of the estuaries of 
the Forth and the Clyde, while the fleet was ordered 
to coast round the north of the island, which it did 
after passing the winter at a port which Tacitus terms 
Trucculensis or Trutulensisy The Caledonians were 
molested no further, for the Roman general was now 

I <' Agricola," ch. 38, 



9© CELTIC BRITAIN. 

recalled by Domitian, who had been emperor since 8 1, 
and was getting jealous of Agricola's reputation. 

Under Agricola's successor the northern part of 
the province became independent again, and when 
Hadrian came here, in the year 120, to quell an in- 
cipient insurrection, he thought it best to draw a line 
from the Solway Firth to the mouth of the Tyne, and 
to defend it with a ditch, a stone wall, and an earthen 
rampart, together with castles and watch-towers. 
Antoninus, who succeeded Hadrian, found it neces- 
sary to send here Lollius Urbicus in the year 139 to 
subdue the Brigantes between Hadrian's Wall and the 
Firth of Forth : he then restored to the province the 
boundary fixed by Agricola, and made an earthen 
rampart between the Forth and the Clyde. Most of 
the country of the Brigantes and kindred tribes had 
now been brought under Roman rule, but not the 
whole; for there were peoples of this group beyond 
the two great rivers, though they usually appear 
under other names, leaving that of Brigajites to be 
identified chiefly with their kinsmen between the 
Forth and the Tees, where in a later age they yielded 
to an Anglian kingdom its name of Bernicia. Our 
authority on this war is Pausanias,i a Greek author who 
flourished about this time, but his words have seldom 
been fully understood. He states that the Romans 
attacked the Brigantes because they had invaded 
a people tributary to Rome, and called by him // 
Vevovvia fiolpa^ the Genunian Division or Cohort. 
This word Genunia seems to betray itself as of Pictish 
1 Didot's Pausanias's "Description of Greece," viii. 43, 



UNDER THE ROMANS. 9 1 

origin, and identical possibly with the name of a 
people of the Western Highlands opposite Skye, 
termed by a writer of the 7 th century Geona Cohors,^ 
or the Geonian Cohort. Such a singular use of juoTpa 
and cohors is only to be explained by the Goidelic 
word it was meant to render, and the latter can have 
been no other than ddl, a division or part, which was 
frequently used in forming ethnic names, like Dal- 
Riada, Dal-Cairbre, and Dal-Cais. The Genunians, 
then, cannot have been Brythons, but Picts of the 
mainland opposite Skye, unless we ought rather to 
treat them as the Pictish dwellers between the Solway 
Esk and Loch Ryan. The latter, however, seem to 
have been the same people who appeared later as 
Atecotti,2 and later still as the Picts of Galloway. 
They were a highly indomitable race, and seldom on 
good terms with their Brythonic neighbours ; so it is 
by no means probable that they had as yet fought it 
out with the Romans. Their tributary condition, 
which may have lasted until the time when the 
Atecotti appear among the fiercest enemies of the 
province, would most likely be of the nature of an 
alliance. This surmise would agree well enough with 
the fact that their country lay beyond the southern 
wall, and with the usual policy of Rome, which offered 
the Genunians ready means of checkmating their 

' See Reeves's " Adamnan's Life of St. Columba," p. 62. It 
is by no means impossible that Geona is a defective spelling of 
Genona, and that in Genona Cohors we should have the 
descendants of the Vtvovvia fiolpa of Pausanias. 

2 Ammian. Marcell., xxvi. 4; xxvii, 8, 



92 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

hereditary foes, the encroaching Brigantes of Bry- 
thonic stock. 

Irruptions into the province by the independent 
tribes beyond the two Firths are recorded as taking 
place in 162 and 182. Not long afterwards they 
appear again in a threatening attitude, though they 
had been bribed to be quiet for some years. This 
time, in 201, they are spoken of as Caledonii and 
M^at3e,i the latter being in all probability the peoples 
that lived between the Ochils and the sea coast, and 
from Dion Cassius's account they would seem to have 
been in possession of a district adjoining the Northern 
Wall : possibly they had even gained a footing on 
the southern coast of the Firth of Forth. These 
were the two names under which the independent 
tribes of the north now made their appearance 
in history, and the state of things which they had 
produced was considered serious enough by Severus 
to demand his presence in the province. He under- 
took an expedition against them in 208 at the head 
of a larger force than had ever before threatened 
their home. The northern confederates sent to sue 
for peace, which they did not get as they had been 
hitherto accustomed, since the emperor had re- 
solved to open up the North and make it passable 
for troops. Severus set to work making roads, 
throwing up bridges, and clearing the country of 
jungles. He appears to have advanced as far as the 
Moray Firth, and to have returned through the 
heart of the Highlands, without having to fight a 
I Dion Cassius, Uxv. 5 ; Ixj^vi, 12, 13. 



UNDER THE ROMANS. 93 

battle, though the continuous skirmishing carried on 
by the natives cost him the Uves of a very large 
number of his men. When he came back he re- 
reconstructed the wall between the Clyde and the 
Forth, but he had not long been at York when the 
Mseatse were again in arms, with the Caledonii aiding 
them.^ Severus died in 211, and his son Antoninus 
patched up a peace with the northern enemy.^ 

Little is known of Britain from that time to the usur- 
pation of power by Carausius in 287, when he severed 
the island for a while from the Roman empire. He 
had risen to be the head of a fleet intended to repress 
the Saxons and other German tribes who now ravaged 
the coasts of Britain and Gaul. He was at length 
suspected of conniving at their doings; and when 
Maximus, one of the emperors, resolved to be rid of 
him, he revolted with his fleet and got possession of 
Britain, which enjoyed considerable prosperity till 
his death in 294 at the hand of Allectus, one of his 
followers. Allectus enjoyed power for three years, 
until he was slain in 296 in a battle with the army of 
Constantius Chlorus, who joined Britain again to the 
Roman empire after ten years of independence. In 306 
he seems to have marched an army beyond the wall 
into the country of the Caledonians and the other 
Picts, supposed to be the Mseatse of previous his- 
torians. For it is to be remarked here that the habit 
of tattooing the body was so uncommon in southern 
Britain that the term Pictus appears mostly as 
1- Dion Cassius, Ixxvi. 15, 
2 Zonaras, xii. 12 (612). 



y^ 



94 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

synonymous with a native from beyond the Wall of 
Severus. In the year 360 the Picts were joined in 
their ravages by the Scotti from Ireland, who set 
out most probably from the north-east of the island. 
There is reason to beHeve that they were also Picts, 
and that this was not their first appearance in Roman 
Britain. When the Romans had left the northern 
part of the province these invaders had their bands 
swelled in 364 by the Atecotti, a people inhabiting a 
part of the country between the walls. At the same 
time the coast was ravaged by the Saxons, whose 
piratical descents were directed mostly to various 
points between the Wash and the Isle of Wight. 
Theodosius was sent against them in 369, when the 
Saxons retreated to the Orkneys, the Scots to Ireland, 
and the Picts to the country north of the Wall of 
Severus, which was then repaired, while the territory 
up to it was garrisoned and made into a province 
called Valentia or Valentiniana, in honour of Valen- 
tinian, who was then emperor. As regards the 
Atecotti, who had been more ferocious in their 
inroads than the others, they were enrolled in the 
Roman army, to be stationed on the Continent, so 
that some of them were seen by St. Jerome, who has 
left on record the report that they were a British 
people of cannibals. The Picts, or the independent 
natives of the north of the island, are again men- 
tioned^ as two distinct nations, called respectively 
Dicalydones and Verturiones. Under the former 
name, which seems to mean the twin tribe of the 

1 Ammianus Marcellinus, xxvii. 8. 



tJNt)ER tHfi ROMANS* ^5 

Caleddnes, we appear to have to do with the 
Caledonians proper, while the word Verturiones yielded 
in the Goidelic of later times the well-known name 
of the Brythons of the kingdom of Fortrenn, and 
practically it may have applied for a time to those 
Brythons as acting at the head of the Maeatae or 
Boresti^ as their subjects. 

We have now come to the time when Maximus, 
having served under Theodosius, and afterwards ob- 
tained the command of the Roman army in Britain, 
got himself proclaimed emperor here in 383. He had 
repressed the Picts and Scots in 384, but soon after- 
wards, in the year 387, he led the army away, and 
drained the country of its able-bodied men, in order 
to contend on the Continent for the imperial power, 
a struggle which cost him his life in 388. Britain 
was now exposed to the inroads of the Picts and 
the Scots, until Stilicho sent hither in 396 a legion 
which drove them back, and once more garrisoned 
the Northern Wall. In 402 the Roman troops were 
again withdrawn, and then followed another access 

1 Mr. Skene speaks of the latter as Horestii, and connects 
("Celtic Scotland," i. pp. 52, 89) with them two inscriptions at 
Niederbieber, on the Rhine, in which he recognises HOR and H 
as abbreviations of their name ; but the late Dr. Hlibner assur* d 
the author of this little book that the one is a part of the word 
hoirci, and the other of houorem, while neither has anything to 
do with Britain, the Brittoncs mentioned in one of these being, 
as he thinks, a Continental people ; this is a question we shall 
have occasion to return to later, but for the inscriptions the 
reader should turn to Brarabach's "Corpus Inscr. Rhenanarum," 
Nos. 692, 694. 



96 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

of devastation. In answer to the application of the 
Brythons for aid, an army is found to have been pre^ 
sent here in 406. In 407, however, it was led away by 
Constantine, never to return : he was the third emperor 
made by the army after the time when the invasion 
of the Roman empire (by the Vandals, the Alans, and 
other German peoples in the year 406) had inspired 
the soldiers with fear lest the barbarians might cut 
them off in an isolated province. This fear was 
dispelled by Constantine gaining a great victory^ 
which soon made him master <of Gaul and Spain, so 
that the emperor Honorius reluctantly gave him, 
usurper as he was, a share in the imperial authority. 
One of Constantine's ablest generals was a Brython 
called Gerontios, who after a time, thinking himself 
slighted by Constantine and his son, set himself to 
work to overthrow both : among other expedients 
he had recourse to the Germans, whom he 
invited to invade Gaul and Britain, which they did 
in 409. Britain had, it is true, enjoyed little quiet 
from the time the Saxons and other pirates first 
made their appearance on her coasts. Most of 
Constantine's troops were in Spain, and Honorius, 
unable to render any aid, wrote letters to the cities 
of Britain urging them to defend themselves. They 
did so, and with such vigour that in the following 
year, 410, they not only rid themselves of the in- 
vaders, but also packed away ihe few Roman officials^ 
who were still here to carry on the government. 
Honorius, holding Constantine responsible for the 
loss of Britain, and the death of certain of his rela- 



UNDER THE ROMANS. 97 

tives, sent an army against him. Constantine 
shut himself up in the town of Aries, where he was 
killed. This happened in 411, and was followed 
shortly after by the death of Gerontios. When the 
latter invited the Germans to invade the provinces, 
he probably intended thereby to secure Britain for 
himself j but, while the Roman force which had dis- 
posed of Constantine was in quest of Gerontios, his 
own men conspired against him and set fire to his 
dwelling. He defended himself for a while, aided 
by a servant, who was a German of the nation of the 
Alans, but at length he found himself forced to slay 
his servant and his wife at their own request, and 
then to put an end to his own life : his son fled for 
refuge to the Alans. Such is a summary of his 
history given by the contemporary writers, Olympi- 
odorus and Zosimus. By Gerontios we are reminded 
of some of the features of the Vortigern of the well- 
known Hengist story, which we read first in the pages 
of Bede and Nennius, while only a few of its elements 
can be detected in the writings of Gildas in the latter 
part of the sixth century. 

In order to form an idea of what happened in 
Britain after the Roman officials were driven away, 
we must briefly relate how it was ruled as a part of 
the Roman empire. From the time of Severus the 
province was divided into Upper and Lower Britain : 
Dion Cassius ^ gives us to understand that the 
legions stationed at Caerleon on the Usk and Chester 
on the Dee were in Upper Britain, while that located 

1 Iv. 23. 

H 



98 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

at York was in Lower Britain. This statement has 
been construed as proving that the Romans were guided 
in their division of the island by the parallels of lati- 
tude rather than by the natural features of the country, 
vv/hich suggest a boundary marked by the Bristol 
Channel, the Severn, the Avon, the hills beginning 
between the Dove and the Derwent, and extending 
as far as the Tees : all east and south of such a 
line v/ould be Lower Britain, consisting of the area 
covered by the province which Ostorius left bounded 
by the line of the Severn and the Trent, with the 
plain in which York stands added to it, and possibly 
also the coast from the Tees to the Tyne. The 
country beyond it stretching from the Bristol Channel 
to the Sclway Fiith, and embracing two moun- 
tainous tracts with the level ground of Cheshire 
and South Lancashire lying between them, would 
form Upper Britain. It ha?, however, occurred 
to an Italian authority^- on Roman administration, 
that it was the custom of the Romans to call the 
portion of a country nearest to Rome upper, and 
that farther off lower ; but this conclusion, drawn 
from the geographical accident that few of the 
rivers of Europe could be said to flow in the 
direction of Rome, only shows, when the facts are 
examined, that the Romans, like other people, 
allowed the ready test of running water to de- 
cide what was upper and what lower. Thus they 

1 See Borghese, "Opera Omnia," iv. p. 458 : his view has 
been accepted by Dr. Hiibner in the "Corpus Inscr. Lat.," 
vii. p. 4. 



UNDER THE ROMANS. 99 

Spoke of a lower Germany at the mouth of the 
Rhine, and of an Upper Germany higher up that 
river ; similarly, on the Danube, they had an Upper 
Pannonia and an Upper Moesia, situated in the same 
relation to Lower Pannonia and Lower Moesia : 
they do not seem to have proceeded differently when 
at one time they spoke of Dalmatia as Upper 
Illyricum; not to mention that Lower Egypt seems 
to have always been nearer to Rome than Upper Egypt. 
So it is natural to suppose that Upper Britain was 
mainly that part of Roman Britain which the legions 
had to approach by marching in the direction of the 
sources of the Thames, and of the streams that meet 
to form the Humber. In an arrangement made by 
Diocletian, and perfected by Constantine the Great, 
the two Britains were subdivided, Upper Britain into 
prima and secunda, or first Britain and second Britain, 
and Lower Britain into Maxima Csesariensis and 
Flavia Csesariensis. In the case of these last pairs of 
adjectives, the word Britannia was dispensed wdth, so 
that it came to be more closely associated with Upper 
Britain. Subsequently to the formation of Valentia into 
a separate province in 369, a survey of the great offices 
of the empire, or, as it is usually called, the Table of 
Dignities, gives us the names of the British provinces 
in the following order: Maxima Csesariensis, Valentia, 
Britannia Prima, Britannia Secunda, Flavia Csesari- 
ensis.^ Here as elsewhere in the Western Empire 
the sequence was not intended to be that of locality, 
1 "Notitia Dignitatum," ed. Otto Seeck, pp. 105, 107, in, 

|»@f ? H 2 



100 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

but of the dignity! of the governors of the respective 
provinces, and we learn from the same Table that the 
men in charge of Maxima Csesariensis and Valentia 
were of consular rank, while those at the head of the 
other three, being of lower rank, were called prcesides 
or presidents. No less than three other lists exist of 
the provinces of Roman Britain, and at least two of 
them are older than the one we have mentioned.^ 
The order varies in all, but always so as to keep the two 
Britannias together. Roman Britain was sometimes 
spoken of as a province, but technically it was a 
diocese, consisting of five provinces under the rule of 
a vice-prefect or vicar, as he was called. The vicar of 
Britain was responsible to the pretorian prefect of the 
Gauls, who had under his authority the vicars also 
of Gaul and Spain, so that his power reached from 
the Firth of Forth to North Africa. He had to 
do with finance and the administration of justice, 
while the military command was divided between 
three generals, called the Count of Britain, the 
Count of the Saxon Shore in Britain, and the Duke 
of the Britains. This last was so called because pro- 
bably he had to do mainly with the two Britannias or 
provinces of Upper Britain, but towards the close 
of the Roman occupation the forces under his 
command were located in places which were mostly, 
if not all, in the northern part of the territory in- 
trusted to him for its defence, especially the stations 

1 See Mcmmsen in the " Abhandl. d. Ak. d. Wissenschaften 
zu Berlin," 1862, pp. 510, 511. 

^See Mommsen's paper just referred to. 



UNDER THE ROMANS. lOI 

on the Southern Wall ; and it is probable that for 
military purposes the part of Lower Britain north of 
the number had sooner or later to be treated as a part 
of Upper Britain. The Count of the Saxon Shore had 
under his command the troops stationed at various 
points between the Wash and the Isle of Wight, the 
coast which was most exposed to invasion from 
Saxons and kindred Germans. The Count of Britain 
had the entire diocese under his control, and his com- 
mand does not appear to have been localised like that 
of the other two. On the whole, his position seems 
to have been analogous to that of the Count of 
Italy in the Neighbourhood of the Alps, and of 
the Count of the Territory around Strassburg : 
both of these had districts in their charge, which were 
subject, like Britain, to the inroads of the Germans. ^ 
In the course of the Roman occupation, which 
lasted more than three centuries and a half, most of 
the Celts of the province had both become Christians, 
and grown familiar, to some extent, with the working 
of municipal institutions, which here and there pro- 
bably survived the hurried departure of the officials of 
the empire, who were, doubtless, highly unpopular 
wherever they settled. It may further be supposed 
that Latin was beginning to make rapid conquests : 
not only was it the official language of the province 
but, in all probability, it was the ordinary means 
of communication over a considerable area of the 
south and east of the island, where, more than else- 
where perhaps, the descendants of the motley popu- 

1 "Not. Dig.," pp. i8o, 182, 209, 173, 179. 



I02 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

lation that had followed the Roman standards hither 
formed the nucleus of a Latinizing party. Among its 
strongholds may safely be reckoned York, Lincoln, 
Colchester, and London, which was even then so 
ancient a town that the Roman attempt to change its 
name for ever into Augusta has so far failed that it is 
now known to few. But, whatever Roman refinement 
and institutions survived in this country, the study of 
Roman inscriptions found in the province cannot fail 
to show that, as compared with most of the other 
portions of the empire, Britain was remarkable for its 
military character and the Httle consideration, relatively 
speaking, it allowed the civil element. This probably 
arose in the first mstance from the warlike temper of 
the people, together with the time and' trouble it took 
to subdue them, and later, from the necessity of being 
constantly prepared to ward off the outer barbarians, 
who granted the province no repose. At all events, it 
is from the military point cf view that we set out with 
most hope of being able to pick up the thread of 
transition that should guide us through the mazes of 
the dark period of history extending to the latter part 
of the 6th century. 

It would be a mistake to take for granted that the 
people of Roman Britain, as soon as they were rid of 
the officials of the empire, resolved themselves into 
small communities or tribal states independent of 
each other — a stage which the Britons had pretty 
well left behind them before the Roman Conquest, 
and it is not to be believed that the prolonged lesson 
of imperial centralisation had been altogether lost on 



UNDER THE ROMANS. T03 

them. Did they proceed, then, to choose an emperor 
or a sole king ? There is no satisfactory proof 
that anything of the kind occurred to them, and they 
seem rather to have simply persisted on the lines of 
the military leaderships which the Romans had made 
a reality among them. What became of the office 
of the Count of Britain we know not, but there 
are reasons to think that those of the Duke of 
the Britannias and the Count of the Saxon Shore 
continued, doubtless in a modified form, to exist 
long afterwards. How that should liave come to pass 
is by no means hard to see. Even when Maximus 
took away the army in 387, it is not improbable that 
he placed a small native force to defend the north 
of the province against the Picts and Scots, and 
another to watch the south-eastern coast. It is very 
probable that the commander of the legion that came 
here afterwards and left in 402 did the same thing on 
a larger scale. And when the legions finally de- 
parted for Gaul under Constantine in 400, we are 
told by Gildas that the Romans, when on the point 
of going away, not only urged the Britons to defend 
themselves, but that, in order to help them in so doing, 
they had a wall built for them in the north, and gave 
them the fortifications to garrison, while on the south- 
eastern shore, which had been guarded by a Roman 
fleet, they built towers at intervals within sight of 
the sea, which were also to help the inhabitants in 
their defence of the country. This implies that the 
Britons were to have an army in the north 
and another in the south-east ; that these armies 



I04 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

were a reality is proved by their successfully repel- 
ling the Germans in 410, and by the comparatively 
small extent to which the Picts from beyond the 
Friths were able to settle, in the long run, in 
the country between the Walls. Those armies 
took possession, doubtless, of the quarters left by 
the Roman troops, and it is highly probable that 
their leaders were regarded as the successors of the 
Dux Britanniarum or Britannice and the Comes Litoris 
Saxonici^ and as having a right to those titles. The 
difference between a comes or count, and a dux or 
leader, was only an unimportant one of imperial 
etiquette in favour of the former ; the office of both 
was called a ducatus, and both comes and dux appear 
to have been rendered into Welsh by the term 
givkdig, a ruler or prince, which is the title always 
given in Welsh literature to Maximus, who was pro- 
bably Duke of the Britannias before he made himself 
emperor. It is a significant fact that, with the , 
exception of Arthur, those who seem to have suc- 
ceeded to supreme power here when the Romans 
left are always styled in Welsh literature gwledig^ 
instead of being described by a title signifying 
emperor or the famihar office of king. 

The man to whom Gildas and Nennius, together 
with Welsh tradition generally, point as the one who 
succeeded to the command of the Count of the 
Saxon Shore, or, as we may put it, the one who be- 
came the Gwledig of Lower Britain, appears under 
the name of Ambrosius Aurelianus or Aurelius 
Ambrosius : in Welsh the latter vocable becomes 



UNDER THE ROMANS. I05 

Emrys. According to Gildas, who wrote not more 

than one hundred and fifty years after the time of 

Ambrosius, and who loudly sings his praises, he was 

descended from a Roman family which had enjoyed 

the purple of office, but his relations had been killed 

in the contests with the Saxons, or some of the other 

Germans who harassed the coast : possibly Nectarides, 

Count of the Saxon Shore, who was slain by them in 

364, was of his family. So far as his history can be 

made out, Ambrosius was a very fit man for his work, 

and one calculated to enlist on his side the lively 

sympathies of the Latinizing party. But Nennius 

darkly hints that there was opposition to him, and 

that he had a quarrel with a certain Guitolin, who 

was possibly the head of a faction opposed to the 

Latinizing element. It would seem to have 'been 

overcome, for we find the title of Gwledig confined 

to Ambrosius, who, according to Gildas, was the 

leader of the Britons in their successful effort to drive 

away the Germans. The latter, however, must have 

soon returned, as we find them gradually seizing on one 

portion after another of Lower Britain. How much 

of this Ambrosius lived to see cannot be ascertained : 

the following are the names of the English states 

which rose south of the Humber, together with their 

traditional dates, which will do well enough for our 

purpose : — 

In 449 the Jutes had established themselves in 
Kent, the country of the ancient Cantii : they 
also possessed themselves of the Isle of Wight, 
together with the nearest portion of the mainland. 



106 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

The setting up of the kingdom of the South 
Saxons, now represented by the County of Sussex, 
and surrounded then by the great forest of Anderida, 
is ascribed to the year 477 : this was the country of 
the ancient Regni. In 495 another and greater 
Saxon power, that of the West Saxons or Wessex, is 
represented as springing up in what is now Hamp- 
shire, and rapidly enlarging itself at the expense of 
the old inhabitants of the Belgic districts. Some 
time in the sixth century there arose also an East 
Saxon kingdom, the name of which survives in 
that of the County of Essex, once the land of the 
Trinovantes, and of the Roman colony of Camu- 
lodunon : it is this colony, probably, that has yielded 
the English town its name of Colchester. The dis- 
trict between Essex and the Wash, where the Eceni 
formerly dwelt, was taken by the Angles, who formed 
a South Folk and a North Folk. Other Angles 
seized on the coast between the Wash and the 
Humber, which formerly belonged to the Coritani. 
In time these Anglian settlers came to be included 
in the great kingdom which rose last into prominence 
and power, that of the men who went up the Trent 
into the heart of the country and fixed, against the 
Welsh, the frontier or march, from which the whole 
has come to be known to historians by the would-be 
Eatin name of Mercia. Besides this it took in the 
West Saxon conquests north of the Thames, and 
most of the region covered by the Midland Counties 
of modern England. From the early contact with the 
West Saxons into which the Celtic inhabitants were 



UNDER THE ROMANS. I07 

forced, they learned to call them by their national 
name of Saxons, which, slightly modified into 
Saeson, has come to be the Welsh word for English- 
men generally. 

Welsh legend associates the name of Ambrosius 
mostly with the southern portion of Lower Britain, 
especially with Ambresburh or Amesbury in Wilt- 
shire, a part of the country where the contest with 
the West Saxons was probably very severe. About 
the middle of the sixth century Gildas, a Welsh monk, 
to whom we have already alluded, denounced in the 
bitterest style of the Hebrew prophets the princes of his 
race in his time ; but of the five at whom he preaches 
only two seem to have belonged to Lower Britain,^ 
Constantine, king of Dumnonia, in modern terms, 
Devon and Cornwall, and Aurelius Conan,^ as to 
whose territory Gildas gives no hint, though we may 
guess that it was the country which happened to 
be still in the possession of the Brythons between 
the Severn Sea and Poole Harbour. Gildas appears 
to have been well acquainted with the descendants of 
Ambrosius Aurelianus : he gives us to understand 
that they v/ere still in power ; and perhaps Aurelius 
Conan was their head, a view to which his name lends 
some support. Welsh tradition calls him Kynan, and 
gives him the title of Gwledig, but the charge Gildas 
brings against him, of thirsting for civil war, would 

1 Haddan and Stubbs's "Councils," &c., i. pp. 49-51. 

2 Mommsen loc. cit., p. 43, prints in the vocative Aureli 
Camnc, but gives as other readings of the second vocable 
Chunine and Conane. 



Io8 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

seem to imply that he was unable to maintain his 
supremacy without using force. What portion of the 
original power of the Gwledig still belonged in reality 
or in theory to his family, we have no means of 
making out ; but it was probably under its head 
that the great battle of Mons Badonicns, of un- 
certain site, was fought, according to Bede, in the 
year 493,^ when the Welsh gained an important 
victory, which is sometimes attributed to Arthur. 
After this the West Saxons seem to have remained 
quiet most of the time till the reign of Ceawlin, who 
became king in 556, and fought against the Welsh, 
both along the Thames and the Severn, winning a 
great victory over them at a place called Deorham 
in 577. This battle, in which fell three Welsh kings 
(called in the Saxon Chronicle Conmsegl, Condidan 
and Farinmsegl), was followed by the taking by 
Ceawlin of the important towns of Bath, Gloucester 
and Cirencester, whereby the West Welsh, as those 
of the peninsula south of the Severn Sea came to be 
called, were completely severed from their kinsmen. 
After the death of Condidan, in whom one recognises^ 
the Kynddylan of Welsh literature which connects 
him with what is now Shropshire, his country was 
fearfully ravaged by Ceawlin, and his court at Pengwern 
or Shrewsbury given to the flames.^ These northern 
conquests were lost by Ceawlin, owing to a serious 

1 This date will be fcund discussed and established by M. ce 
la Borderie in the " Revue Celtique," vi. pp. 1-13. 

2 Green's " Making of England," pp. 128, 206. 

2 Skene's " Anc. Books of Wales," ii. pp. 279, &g. 



UNDER THE ROMANS. I09 

defeat at Fethanleag, supposed to be Faddiley, on tbe 
borders of Cheshire, in the year 584 ; but it is to him 
that we have to ascribe the advancing of the 
Saxon boundary on the south to the Axe, while what 
still remained in the possession of the Welsh of the 
country east of the Axe and the Parret appears to 
have been conquered by the Saxons under Cenwalh, 
who died in 672. In the eighth century Ine of Wes- 
sex seems to have succeeded in advancing the Saxon 
boundary to Taunton, though he had to fight with a 
very able prince of the Brythons of those parts, whose 
name appears in Welsh literature as Geraint ; and we 
read of Devon being under English rule in the time 
of Ecgbyrht, who ravaged Cornwall in 815. Still the 
Welshmen of that peninsula do not seem to have 
been wholly subjected to English rule until the time of 
^thelstan, who fixed on the Tamar as their eastern 
boundary. It is needless to add that they continued 
to be Celtic for a long time afterwards, and that their 
language finally died out not much more than a hundred 
years ago. This was in West Cornwall : among the 
intermediate stages we rfiay mention, after William of 
Malmesbury, the division of Exeter between the Welsh 
and the English in ^>thelstan's time, and the fact that 
the Welshman Asser, King Alfred's friend, was familiar 
with a number of Welsh names in Dorset such as Diirn- 
gueir for Durnovaria, the old name of Dorchester, Cairu- 
Misciox Exeter, and Frauu for an earlier Frdma for the 
river Frome ; not to mention from Wiltshire the name 
Guilou for the Wiley that joins the Avon at Salisbury.^ 

1 See Stevenson's eJition ( f Asser's Life of King Alfred 
(Ox'ord, 1904), pp. 241, 219-51, and p. Ixxv , and seq. 



no CELTIC BRITAIN. 

The survival of Welsh in that region is suggested also 
by the Brythonic names of persons, on the few in- 
scribed stones^ in point, at the Devonshire church of 
Lustleigb, for instance, and at St. Mary's Church, 
Wareham, where there is a remarkable little group 
which the church " restoring " vandals of the last 
century have not wholly succeeded in destroying. 
The spelling of the names and the form of the letters 
seem to point to the ninth or the tenth century. 

Now that we have very briefly shown how the 
English mastered Lower Britain, the question arises, 
how far the old inhabitants were allowed to remain. 
It has sometimes been supposed, that, as long 
as the conquerors continued to be pagans, they 
gave the former no quarter; but a more humane 
treatment may be expected to have prevailed with 
them after their adoption of Christianity : some of the 
principal events implied are the following : — the con- 
version of Edwin, King of Northumbria, in 627; the 
baptism of Cynegils, King of Wessex, in 635, and of 
his son in the following year. Mercia was pagan until 
Penda's death in 655, but under his sons it became 
Christian. The conquests by those states after the above 
dates need, therefore, not imply a complete displacement 
of the previous population, and there are not wanting 
indications that there were even as late as the time of 
^Ethelstan in the tenth century patches of country, 
especially in Wessex, which were under English rule, 

1 For Lustleigh see the Ar. Cam, 1880, pp. 161-3, 1882, 
p. 50, and for Wareham the Proceedings of " The Dorset Nat. 
Hist, and Antiq. Field Club," 1892, p. xxiv., plate. 



UNDER THE ROMANS. Ill 

but Still inhabited by the Welsh, who only ceased to 

be such by being gradually assimilated to the Saxons 

around them. The subject, which is a difficult one, 

will be found discussed in another volume of this 

series ; but, on the whole, one may consider that it 

still remains to be proved that the ancient inhabitants 

were not to a certain extent allowed to remain as 

slaves and tillers of the ground, even in the south 

and the east, and in districts where they did not 

succeed in maintaining themselves in their towns 

until the conquerors became Christians. On the 

other hand, those who are inclined to think that the 

Celts and Latinizing populations were cut clean 

off the ground must not make too much of the 

negative argument, that EngUsh in its earliest stages 

contains hardly any words borrowed from Celtic ; for 

the language of a considerable portion of the south 

and east of the island may be supposed to have 

become Latin by the time of the English conquest. 

Indeed it has been argued with great probability that 

the inhabitants of Britain, whom the English first 

called Wealas, or Welshmen, were not the Brythons, 

or Brettas, as they termed them, but the provincial 

Romans, or the Latinizing part of the population,^ 

though the name came eventually to include the 

Brythonic Celts of the west of the island. In that 

case what should rather be asked is, how many Latin 

words there are to be found in the earliest known 

specimens of English. Much the same remarks 

apply, of course, to Upper Britain, with which we 

have next to deal. 

See Coote's " Romans of Britain," pp. 176-180. 



112 CELTIC BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER IV. 



THE KYMRY. 



Let us now see what became of the people of Upper 
Britain when the Romans went away. Before that 
event the Picts and Scots had more than once been 
able to carry their plundering expeditions into 
the heart of the province ; but the comparative 
efficiency of the native army, which undertook 
the defence of the north, is proved by the fact 
that the only settlement worth mentioning which the 
northern tribes were able permanently to make within 
what had been Roman Britain was that effected by 
the Picts on the Southern side of the Firth of Forth. 
It is called in Welsh Manaw of the Gododin, to dis- 
tinguish it from another Manaw beyond the Forth, as 
well as from the Isle of Man, which appears in the 
same language as the Island of Manaw. This Pictish 
settlement included the part of Lothian in which 
Edinburgh is situated, and a portion of the Pent- 
land Hills, a name which is, nevertheless, not de- 
rived from Pehtland, the land of the Peht or Pict. 
These, however, were not the only Picts south 
of the Northern Wall : the district on the Solway, 
between the Nith and Loch Ryan, was inhabited 
in Bede's time by a people whom he terms Picts, 



THE KYMRY. II3 

while he adds that they were also known as Niduari 
or men of the Nith."^ They are more usually called the 
Picts of Galloway : they had probably been there from 
of old, and consisted of a remnant of the Atecotti, 
which signifies that they agreed with the other Picts 
in tattooing themselves, and in being always ready to 
help against the Brythons. There is no reason to 
think that any very considerable portion of Upper 
Britain was seized immediately after the departure 
of the Romans by German invaders, though it is 
possible that small German settlements had been 
made on certain points of the coast between the 
Tyne and the Forth at a comparatively early date. 
The time usually fixed on as that of the rise of a 
regular state on that sea-board is 547, when Ida is 
said to have commenced his reign, in the course of 
which he fortified Bamborough to be his capital. 
Some think that there were Jutes or Frisians in the 
neighbourhood 'of the Firth of Forth ; but, even if 
that be true, the stat^ as a whole, and as known to 
history, was an Anglian one, and strangely enough 
the people were known in Bede's time by a name 
derived from that of the ancient Celtic Brigantes. 
For he speaks of them in Latin as Bernicii, a word 
made from the Anglo-Saxon Baernicas, which appears 
to have been the English pronunciation of the 
Welsh equivalent Breennych or Brenneich : this in 
its turn is to be traced to the same origin as the 

1 See Bede's " Life of St. Cuthbert/' chap. xi. : the passage 
is quoted with interesting remarks in Skene's " Celtic Scotland," 

P- 133- 

I 



114 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

name of the Brigantes : thus the term Bernicii seems 
to have meant the people of the Brigantic land, which, 
in this case, was mostly that of the ancient Otadini, 
better Votadini^ the Gododin of Welsh literature, 
together with a part possibly of that of another 
people, the Uumnonii. Another Anglian people had 
seized on the country of the ancient Parisi between 
the Humber and the Tees. Like the northern 
Angles, but unlike the other Angles and the Saxons, 
they also got to be known by a name of Celtic origin. 
In Latin they have been called from Bede's time, 
Deiri, and their country Deira, both suggested by the 
English pronunciation of one or more forms derived 
from the same source as the Welsh name of the 
district or of its old inhabitants : this was Deivr, which 
has probably come down from early times, though it 
is not read in any ancient author. It is not known at 
what date Bernicia extended itself southwards to the 
Tees, so as to have a common boundary with Deira ; 
nor is much known at all about the latter, till the time 
of ^thelfrith, a king of the Bernicians whom we shall 
have to mention again as we go on. He had taken 
possession of Deira and made himself king of both 
states, and thenceforth Deira and Bernicia were some- 
times separate and sometimes united. In the latter 
case the whole is known as Northumberland, or else 
in quasi-Latin as Northumbria, which may serve to 
prevent the thoughtless from confounding the whole 
with the part that forms the county now bearing the 
former name. 

But even after the encroachments, briefly describe4 



THE KYMRY. II5 

as ultimately embracing the whole seaboard from the 
Humber to the Firth of Forth, the tract of country 
still in the possession of the Celts of Upper Britain 
was very considerable, comprising all the west of the 
island from the Severn Sea to the Solway Firth and 
thence to the Clyde. Was it anything more than 
a tract of the island in the meagre geographical 
sense, and did it contain any of the political essen- 
tials of a state ? This would seem at first sight to 
admit of no other than a negative answer, and its 
length of indefensible frontier would have led one to 
expect that it would be divided in a short time into 
two or more pieces. But, as a matter of fact, we find 
that it kept together for more than two hundred 
years ; that when it v/as permanently cut in two, in 
consequence of the defeat of the Welsh at the great 
battle of Chester and the events that followed, it 
roused them to a fierce struggle ; and that, when this 
ended unfavourably to themselves, it was regarded as 
the destruction of all their aspirations, and the rudest 
shock ever given their traditions. Neither had Upper 
Britain the advantage of being the patrimony of 
a single and homogeneous race : not only were 
there Picts in Galloway, but the north-west of the 
Principality of Wales, and a great portion of the 
south of it, had always been in the possession of 
a Goidelic people, whose nearest kinsmen were the 
Goidels of Ireland. The other Celts of Upper 
Britain, that is to say, the Britons proper or Brythons, 
were no doubt in the ascendant, but there were 
also Brythonic communities elsewhere, some north of 

I 2 



Il6 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

the Forth, about whom little is known, some south of 
the Severn Sea, and some in a Britain of their own 
in Gaul. Yet the ties of union between those of 
Upper Britain proved so strong and close, that the 
word Kymry, which merely meant fellow-countrymen, 
acquired the force and charm of a national name, 
which it still exercises over the natives of the Princi- 
pality. This name is better known to Englishmen in 
connection with Cumberland or its Latinized form 
Cumbria, and the still more distorted one of Cambria. 
Nor was a common name the only or most important 
outcome of this feeling of unity ; for the Kymry 
developed a literature of their own, differing from 
that of the other Brythonic communities : above all 
the destruction of their state in the seventh century is 
the burning theme of many a Welsh poem, sung in a 
language now but imperfectly understood. Since 
the union of the Kymry seems to have been neither 
dictated by reasons of geography and frontier, nor 
clearly defined for them by considerations of race, 
we have to look for the historical accidents which 
served to determine it in the first instance, and to 
invest it afterwards with an intelligible form. This 
takes us back again to the last years of the Roman 
occupation. 

The Romans were in the habit of forcing the 
natives of Britain, like those of their other provinces, 
to enrol themselves in the imperial army, and at first 
it was, doubtless, the rule for them to serve on the 
Continent, far away from their kith and kin : as 
danger ceased at length to be apprehended from the 



THE KYMRY. II7 

provincials themselves, and came to be expected from 
without, some of the native troops were allowed to 
serve in Britain. Inscriptions and other documents 
give us the locality and official names of a few such 
regiments posted in the northern part of the pro- 
vince. Both during the absence of the Roman troops 
previous to 410, and after the final departure of the 
officials of the empire in that year, the work of 
defence devolved on the inhabitants, and it is by no 
means probable that any corner of the country wont 
to be under the charge of the Dux Britanniarum 
could be excused from supplying the native army 
with its quota of men who were to fill the place of 
his soldiers : any reluctance which may have here and 
there shown itself must have been promptly borne 
down by the pressing necessity of acting in concert 
for the defence of the country against the baibarians, 
who were pushing their way southwards. It may be 
gathered that it was the fact of being under the 
charge of a single general, the Dux Britanniarum, 
which had the effect of marking off from the other 
Brythons those who afterwards gave themselves the 
name of Kymry, and of first teaching them, perhaps, 
in some measure to act together : it was probably 
the violence of the invader from without that sup- 
plied the force which was to weld them more closely 
together. The area of the country to which this 
applies was most likely coextensive with the military 
authority of the Dux Britanniarum, but unfortunately 
the boundaries of the latter can only be guessed, partly 
as already hinted, and partly from the indications we 



Il8 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

have as to the territory which the Kymry called their 
own after Britain was severed from the empire. 

The earliest of their native rulers, so far as we know, 
was called Cunedag or Cunedda, about whom Welsh 
literature has a good deal to say, though not enough 
to give us a complete view of his history. His name 
is Celtic, and tradition, which makes him a son of a 
daughter of Coel, speaks of him as a man from Coelm.^ 
This would connect him with the North, where Coel's 
country seems to have been the district since called 
Kyle, in the present county of Ayr. It is from the 
North also, from Manaw of the Gododin, that Nennius 
describes him and his sons as coming into Wales, 
and, for anything we know, he may have been the 
head of one of the noble families of the Brigantes : 
it is not improbable that he had also Roman blood 
in his veins, for we find that the names of his father 
and grandfather were ^^ternus and Paternus, whose 
father was named Tacitus. Further, some of his 
ancestors had very probably worn the official purple 
under the Roman administration, which derives 
support from the fact that the Welsh pedigrees^ 
always give Paternus or Padarn the epithet of 
Peisrudd or him of the red tunic. All this would, no 
doubt, greatly help Cunedda inio a position of in- 
llaence and authority : the following things are in 

1 See the elegy on Cunedda in the Book of Taliessin in 
Skene's " Ancient Books of Wales," ii. pp. 200-2 ; also the 
*'Iolo MSS.," pp. 120, 121, 126. 

2 See the Harleian MS., 3859, fol. 193/^ at the British 
Museum. 



THE KYMRY. II9 

point, and more or less clearly asserted by Welsh 
tradition : — That Wales was under his sway and that 
of his sons ; that his power was supreme from Carlisle 
to Caer Weir, supposed to be Wearmouth on the 
eastern coast, where the territory of the Angles was 
not destined to become suddenly continuous ; that 
he had his court at Carlisle ; ^ that his retinue on 
the wall consisted of 900 horse ;^ that he wore the 
badge of office of the Dux Britanniarum, which, as in 
the case of other duces under the Empire, consisted 
of a gold belt,'^ to which an obscure passage in a 
Welsh poem * seems to allude as Cunedda's girdle ; 
and that he was the ancestor from whom a great 
number of the more remarkable saints of Wales 
traced their descent. The account which Nennius ^ 
gives of Cunedda states that he and his sons came 
to Wales from Manaw of the Gododin 146 years 
before the reign of Maelgwn, the most powerful of his 
descendants. This would &eem to allude to the time 

1 ** lolo MSS.," p. 147, where Cunedda the Gwledig is styled 
king of the Island of Britain. 

^ This is alluded to in the elegy already mentioned. 

^ Gibbon's "Roman Empire" (Smith's ed.), ii. p. 320 (chap, 
xvii.). 

^ It is the elegy already mentioned, and the word used is crys^ 
which now only means a shirt ; but it seems to have meant a 
girdle in another old poem given in Skene's "Anc. Bks. of 
Wales," ii. p. 267, &c., and the cognate Irish criss always 
meant a girdle, while the intermediate meaning of the Welsh 
word as that of an upper dress is attested by passages in " The 
Mabinogion" (Guest's ed.), ii. p. 13 ; iii. p. 266. 

^ Mommsen's "Chronica Minora," iii, c. 62 (p. 205). 



120 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

when the Picts succeeded in possessing themselves 
of a part of Manaw, and it settles the date as falling 
somewhere very near the departure of the Romans 
from Britain. 

Nennius, in speaking of Cunedda's son«, says that 
they were eight,^ but later versions of the legend add 
to their number and trace to their names those of 
various districts in Wales. Among other things we 
are told that the eldest son died before leaving the 
North, that his son inherited among his uncles, and 
that his name, which was Meirion, clung to the 
district still called Meirion or Merioneth : another 
story, preserved by Geoffrey of Monmouth, makes 
Meirion, whom he calls Margan, brother to Cunedda, 
who slays him in battle in the land bearing his 
name. Keredig, another son of Cunedda, left his 
name to Keredigion, our Cardiganshire ; and similarly 
in the case of others of his sons, who are said to 
have left their names to districts lying more towards 
the north-west of Wales. With the exception of a 
part of Merioneth, this probably represents the en- 
croachments of the Brythons on the territory which 
belonged to peoples of the Goidelic branch, the 
Scotti of Nennius. He mentions them as driven 
out of the country with terrible slaughter by 
Cunedda and his sons, the limits of whose territory 
in Wales are afterwards variously stated to have 
been the Dee and the Teivi, ^ the southern boundary 
of Cardiganshire, or the Dee and a stream called the 

1 Mommsen's " Chronica Minora," ibid. 
^ Harleian MS., 3859, fol. 195a. 



THE KYMRY. 121 

Gwaun,! which reaches the sea at Abergwaun or 
Fishguard in Pembrokeshire. The centre of gravity, 
so to speak, of the power of Cunedda in Wales was 
in the country of the Ordovices, a Brythonic people 
that does not seem to have resisted his rule. Nor do 
we find a clue to any complication with the Silures 
of the south-east of Wales ; so it may be presumed that 
they also acquiesced in the supremacy of Cunedda. 
How, then, was his power established here in the first 
instance? The only answer we can suggest is that 
his rule was recognized as that of the Gwledig, or per- 
petuator of the command of the Dux Britanniarum ] 
that the office gave him the means of making his sons 
kings of various districts in Wales ; and that, the Goidels 
of the south and the north-west being opposed to his 
rule, his sons gratified the Brythons by giving them 
their land. Probably Cunedda, while enjoying the 
power of the Gwledig as far as the Severn Sea, 
identified himself more closely with the part of his 
charge north and east of the Dee j nay, it is even 
possible that he never visited Wales in person at all. 
In any case, he found the means of bequeathing 
to his descendants power of two kinds, that is to say, 
power over the special districts which they then 
treated as their own, and the power of the Gwledig, 
which they seem to have jealously kept among them- 
selves for centuries afterwards. Some light is thrown 
on the Scotti of Nennius by the Irish story ^ of the 

1 "Lives of the Cam.-Brit. SS.," p. loi. 

* This will be found in the Book of the Dun, fol. 53^-546 ; 
also in the Bodley Manuscripts, Laud Misc. 610, fol. 996, 2 ; and 
Rawlinson, B. 502, fol. 72a 2. 



122 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

banishment from Meath of a people called the Deisi, 
who are said to have sailed to Dyved and to have 
made a settlement there. 

We have, however, no knowledge who were the 
Gwledigs of the Kymry for more than a hundred 
years after Cunedda's time ; but about the middle 
of the sixth century we have the help of the 
writings of Gildas, in which he denounces five princes 
of his time :^ three of these appear to have had 
their homes in Wales. Their names were Vortiporios, 
which in the Welsh predigrees becomes Guortepir f 
Cuneglasos, later Cinglas and Cynlas; and Maglocunos, 
a name better known in Wales in its later form 
of Maelgwn. Now Gildas, while bringing against 
Maelgwn very grievous charges, of the grounds of 
which we have no means of forming an opinion, gives 
us to understand that he had for a time been a monk 
and had for instructor one of the most accomplished 
men in Britain, who, it may be inferred from a life 
of St. Cadoc, was no other than that philosophizing 
saint himself 3 Gildas not only represents Maelgwn 
as a great warrior, and superior in stature to the 
other princes he names, but he alludes more than 
once to the fact of his standing far above them also 

^ Iladdan and Stubbs's "Councils," &c., i. pp. 50-56, and 
Mommsen's "Chronica," loc. cit. pp. 41-5. Gildas calls two of 
them lion's whelps, the next is "pardosimilismoribus," the fourth 

addressed as a bear, and the fifth is a dragon. This last refers 
probably to his standard (p. 136 below), and a similar remark 
applies possibly to the other four. 

'^ Harleian MS. 3859, fol. 193 b. 

•■^ See the "Lives of the Cam.-Erit. SS.," p. 52. 



THE KYMRY. 1 23 

in point of authority and power. Cuneglasos or 
Cynlas is not described in such a way that we can 
be sure where he ruled, but the name was borne by a 
grandson of Cunedda's son Einion, of whom Maelgwn 
was also grandson, while a story recorded in the " lolo 
MSS." (p. 171) mentions Cynlas as lord of Glamorgan 
and father of St. Cadoc. But this differs from the 
usual account, and it would not be safe to rely upon 
it, as the history of St. Cadoc is a most difficult one 
to disentangle. Provisionally, one may regard the 
prince in question as being Maelgwn's relative, acting 
as a sort of lieutenant to him and having as his head- 
quarters the ancient place known as Dineirth, in the 
neighbourhood of the town of Llandudno.^ Lastly 
Vortiporios, whom Gildas terms tyrant of the Demetce 
or the people ol Dyved, was probably king of the 
portion of Dyved which had not been included in 
Keredig's territory. Vortiporios was the direct repre- 
sentative of the leader of the exiles from Ireland who 

1 The text of the beginning of the paragraph clevo!ed to 
Cuiicglasus offers difficulties : among other thing?;, he is ad- 
dressed as " urse multorum sessor auiigaque curnis receptaculi 
Ursi," where rcccptaculiim Ursi is probably a translation of a 
place-name ; and I conjecture the latter to have been Dinerth 
(or Dineirth) for an Q&rly Diinos ox Dilnon Arti " Bear's fortress"- 
compare Din- cat interpreted as Receptaculum Ptigiire in the 
Life of St Paul de Leon (Revue Celtique v. 418). In that case 
Auriga receptaculi Ursi might be rendered " the driver of the 
Chariot of Dinerth." A different interpretation has been given 
by Mr. Nicholson in "The Academy," Oct. 12, 1895, p. 297 ; 
and, lastly, one wonders whether Gildas had not the Constella- 
tions in his mind as he wrote the passage. 



124 ' CELTIC BRITAIN. 

settled in Dyved, and he had doubtless to submit to 
the power of the Cunedda family, which is corroborated 
by the fact that Keredig's grandson, St. David, was 
about this time establishing himself as bishop in the 
latter region. Now the head of that family at this time 
was undoubtedly Maelgwn, whose authority reached 
to every corner of Wales. His own kingdom, how- 
ever, was that of Venedot, Gwyndod or Gwynedd, 
the last of which is a name that now means all 
North Wales : it appears at one time to have denoted, 
more strictly speaking, that portion of it, approxi- 
mately, which is covered by the Vale of Clwyd and 
the district west of it and north of the Mawddach. 
Gildas gives us no clue to the history of the Kymry 
from the Dee to the Clyde, and most other sources of 
information on the point have long since been closed 
by the disappearance of Welsh and Welsh traditions 
in Cumbria. What Gildas tells us about the many 
princes Maelgwn had overthrown, as well as the 
obscure allusions in Welsh poetry to Maelgwn and 
his hosts in the North, together with the later history 
of the Kymry, would tend to show that whoever 
the princes were who reigned over them north and 
east of the Dee, they must have done so subject to 
Maelgwn as Gwledig or whatever the leader had 
begun to be called by his time. 

Brave and intrepid in war as Maelgwn undoubtedly 
was, his authority was certainly not altogether the 
direct result of his success in the field : it was in part 
at least due to the standing rule of the princes of the 
house of Cunedda, whereby one of them obtained 



THE KYMRY. 1 25 

the office of Gwledig, or, as it might now be termed, 
that of over-king. This is very clearly seen, as far 
as regards Wales, in a story invented afterwards to 
account for Maelgwn's supremacy : it occurs in some 
of the manuscripts of the Welsh Laws,i and is to the 
following effect : — The nation of the Kymry, after 
losing the crown and sceptre of London and being 
driven out of England, assembled by agreement to 
decide who should be chief king over them. The 
place of meeting was Maelgwn's Strand, near the 
mouth of the River Dovey, whither came the leading 
men from all parts of Wales : there Maeldav the 
Elder (lord of Moel Esgidion in Merioneth, according 
to one version, but of Pennardd in Arvon according 
to another) placed Maelgwn in a chair cunningly 
made of birds' wings. When the tide rose, it 
drove all away except Maelgwn, whom his chair 
enabled to stay, and thereby he became chief king, 
and his word and law paramount over the other 
princes, without being himself bound by theirs, while 
Maeldav for his services on the occasion obtained 
certain privileges for his own lordship. This legend, 
whatever else it teaches, clearly shows that Maelgwn's 
supremacy was in some way or other the result of the 
suffrages of the other princes of the Kymry. We 
have no means of ascertaining how the selection was 
usually made : as a rule the most shrewd and powerful 
member of the family of Cunedda managed to get 
himself declared head or over-king, and this may be 

1 See the 8vo. edition of 1841, vol. ii. pp. 49-51 ; also the 
*' lolo MSS.," pp. 73-74. 



126 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

supposed to have not unfrequently been the cause of 
quarrels and civil wars. 

Not only was Maelgwn beyond doubt the greatest 
prince of the Kymry from the time of Cunedda, but 
he succeeded in so strengthening the position of 
his family that the over-kingship remained afterwards 
with his descendants. This Vv^ill appear from a brief 
outline of their history. Maelgwn's son Rhun, who 
inherited his father's power, had only a portion of 
his ability, and the manuscripts of the Welsh Laws ^ 
speak of Gwynedd being devastated in Rhun's time 
by the Men of the North, and of his successfully 
carrying the war into that region, v/here the men of 
Arvon distinguished themselves in the van of his hosts 
in crossing the Forth. Rhun had a son Beli, of whom 
nothing is known : he may have died before his father, 
but he left a son lago, v/ho died about the time of the 
battle of Chester in 6i6,^ in which several Welsh 
princes fell, including Selyv, son of Cynan, whom the 
Irish annalist, Tigernach, calls Rex Bretanorum 
(Revue Celtique, xvii. 171). For anything known to 

1 Vol. i. p. 104. 

" Mr. Plumraer, in his edition of Bede's works, ii. p. 77, shows 
that the true date was not 613 as given in the Welsh Chronicle, 
otherwise called Annalcs Caiiibrice, but 616, and that the death 
of ^thelfriih occurred soon after, in 616 or 617. The 
" Annales" date lago's death in the year of the battle, but their 
use of the word dormitat (or dormitatio) negatives a violent 
death, and contradicts the Triad that ascribes lago's death to 
Cadavael. In the Red Book dialogue put into the mouths of 
Myrdin and his sister Gwendyd, the succession is the following : 
— Maelgwn, Rhun, Beli, lago, Cadfan. No Selyf is mentioned : 
see Skene, ii. 220-21. 



THE KYMRV. I27 

the contrary, he may for a short time have enjoyed the 
position of over-king of the Kymry and acted as their 
general in that war : a superficial reading of the 
oldest allusion to the battle, namely, in Bede's Eccle- 
siastical History, has sometimes led to the supposition 
that the man who acted in that capacity was Brochvael, 
the only Welsh prince whose name he gives. What 
Bede says, however, is, that very many priests, belong- 
ing mostly to the monastery of Bangor Iscoed, had 
come after a three days' fast to pray for success to their 
nation in the contest which was about to take place ; 
that the priests had soldiers to defend them a little 
apart in a secure place under the command of Broch- 
vael ; that Y^^thelfrith, on hearing of this, resolved to 
begin by making an onslaught on the priests; and 
that Brochvael and his men took to flight, when about 
1,200 of the monks were slain, and only fifty escaped. 
This slaughter was afterwards regarded by the English 
as a judgment on the Kymry for having refused to join 
Augustine in Christianizing their nation ; he had some 
years before had a meeting on the borders of Wales 
with the bishops and learned men of the Kymry 
under the lead of Dunawd, or Dinoot as Bede calls 
him. The pride and arrogance of the priest filled 
with anger the men whose assistance he had come to 
seek. To return to Bede, he tells us little about the 
battle which followed the massacre of the monks 
and Brochvael's flight ; nor do we know whether 
the latter took any part in it. The historian, 
however, says that the Anglian king did not gain 
his victory without great losses to his own army ; 



128 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

and the reason Brochvael was told off to guard the 
priests is not far to seek : he appears to have been 
lord of the country around Bangor as well as 
nearly connected with its abbot Dunawd ; and if, 
perchance, he was the Brochvael who died in the 
year 662, he cannot be supposed to have been old 
and tried enough to have had the command of the 
whole army intrusted him in the presence of not 
a few princes, who probably were more experienced 
than he could well have been. We have supposed 
lago to have been the chief of these, a view not dis- 
countenanced by the likelihood that his son Cad van, 
who must have followed him as king of Gwynedd, 
about the time of the Battle of Chester, 
was also for a short time over-king of the Kymry. 
Even this, favoured though it be by Welsh tra- 
dition, is not certain. It seems, however, to be the 
key to the flattering language ot Cadvan's epitaph, 
which happens to be still existing at the Anglesey 
church of Llangadwaladr close to Aberffraw, where 
the kings of Gwynedd lived, probably from the time 
of Maelgwn. Llangadwaladr is thought to be so 
called from Cadvan's grandson Cadwaladr, who 
appears to have died in 664. The church was built 
by him, or in his honour, and the inscription cut, in 
the so-called Hiberno-Saxon character, on a stone, 
has the appearance of being of the seventh century : 
the words are — Catamanus rex sapientisimus opina- 
tisimus omnium regum — King Cad van, the most wise 
and renowned of all kings. We now come to Cadvan's 
son and successor Cadwallon : there is no room for 



THE KYMRY. 1 29 

doubt concerning the union of all the Kymry under 
his leadership in the closing struggle with the Angles 
of Northumbria ; but we must revert to the battle of 
Chester. 

^^thelfrith was at first king only of Bernicia ; but, 
at the death of his kinsman ^lle of Deira, he suc- 
ceeded in adding that to his own kingdom ; and thus 
he became the first king of all Northumbria, while 
yEUe's young son Eadwine or Edwin, with his friends, 
sought refuge in other lands, among which may be 
mentioned Gwynedd, where Welsh tradition speaks of 
him as being brought up for a time at the court of 
Cadvan in Mona.^ There is probably some truth in 
this, and it is possible that it was the cause of 
^thelfrith's expedition to Chester. At any rate, it is 
quite in keeping with his later conduct as described 
by Bede ; for Edwin, according to this author, found 
refuge soon after the battle of Chester at the court of 
Raedwald, king of the East Angles, and yEthelfrith, 
hearing of it, offered gifts t*") Raedwald to compass 
Edwin's death : he sent a second and a third time, 
adding the threat of war in case he persisted in turning 
a deaf ear to his wish. As Raedwald did not comply, 
^thelfrith set out with an army to execute his 
threat. Raedwald and Edwin met him and fought 
a battle in which the Northumbrian king fell, so that 
Edwin succeeded him as king both of Deira and 
Bernicia: this took place in the year 616 or 617, 
or at any rate soon after the battle of Chester. 
But, for some reason or other, ^thelfrith's advantages 

1 See the "Myv. Arch." (ii. p. 17) triad 81. 
K 



130 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

were not vigorously followed up, although Bede gives 
him the credit of being a most brave and ambitious 
prince, who harassed the Welsh more than any other 
English king, and seized on more of their country than 
any one before him : possibly the Kymry offered him 
some kind of submission, and promised no longer 
to harbour Edwin. It was partly due, perhaps, to 
the losses suftered by the Anglian army, which were 
so serious that Bede mentions them as great, and 
that Welsh tradition has construed them into a vic- 
tory for the Kymry. Above all it must have been 
due to the death of yEthelfrith himself, the originator 
of the war. The battle of Chester left the city 
desolate, never to be afterwards haunted by its 
Kymric dwellers, and it was probably the first time 
that the Kymry found the whole force of the 
Angles north of the Humber arrayed against them ; 
and, on the whole, the battle seems to have had 
the decisive character which it has been the fashion 
to ascribe to it of late. Something much more de- 
cisive, however, was shortly to follow : it was the 
succession of Edwin to ^thelfrith's place as king 
of Northumbria, He is said to have subdued all the 
English princes to his rule except his father-in-law, 
the king of Kent ; the Kymry suffered likewise from 
his power. Among the first of them were probably 
those of the small kingdoms of Loidis and Elmet, 
the former of which has left its name to the town 
of Leeds, and the latter to Barwick-in-Elmet and 
Sherburn-in-Elmet in the West Riding of Yorkshire. 
Their land was annexed to that of Deira, on the 



THE KYMRV. I3I 

confines of which they lay ; but Edwin did not 
stop here, as we read in Bede's history of his 
having conquered the islands of Man and Mona, 
the latter of which is known in Welsh as Mon and 
in English as Anglesey. Bede's statement is signi- 
ficant, for Anglesey was, as it were, the home and 
stronghold of the kings of Gwynedd : in fact, both 
this conquest and the utterances of Welsh tradition 
would lead one to suppose that the Kymry were 
for some time wholly at the mercy of the North- 
umbrian king,^ while Cadwallon, who appears to 
have succeeded his father, Cadvan, about the same 
time that Edwin attained to power, had at one 
period of his life to seek refuge in Ireland : unfortu- 
nately, we have no sure indication of the dates we 
want. The Northumbrian king became Christian in 
627, and was baptized by Paulinus, a bishop who 
followed northwards the former's Christian queen, who 
was daughter to the King of Kent ; and that prelate 
is usually given the whole credit of converting the 
Northumbrians. On the other hand, Nennius claims it 
for a Welshman named Rhun ^ son of Urien, and the 
Welsh Chronicle assigns his efforts to the preceding 
year. So it may be supposed that during those years 
the Kymry were under the Northumbrian king's 

1 Tigernach, in his entry of Edwin's triumph over Cadwallon, 
describes the former as a man " qui totam Britaniam regnavit " 
(" Rev. Celtique," xvii. 181). 

^ It has been suggested that Rhun son of Urien was the 
pre-ordination name of Paulinus : see Nicholson's paper on 
Films Urbagen in Meyer & Stern's " Zeitschrift flir celtische 
Philologie," iii. 105, 109. 

K 2 



132! CELTIC BRITAIN. 

yoke, and that they joined in the work of converting 
his subjects to Christianity. Next, the Chronicle 
above mentioned speaks laconically of King Cadwal- 
Ion as being besieged or blockaded in the year 629 
in the island of Glannog, now better known as 
Priestholm or Puffin Island, opposite Beaumaris on 
the coast of Anglesey. This was probably done by 
Edwin's fleet, and it may be taken as possibly marking 
the close of the drama which ended with Cadwallon's 
escape to Dublin. Again Welsh tradition speaks of 
several battles fought by Edwin, which we cannot date, 
one near the Conwy and one also on Digoll or the 
Long Mountain in Shropshire, a spot with which the 
Triads connect a fierce struggle known as one of the 
Three Discolourings of the Severn:^ these engage- 
ments possibly took place before Cadwallon's flight. 
Cadwallon returns ^ after a time to recover his 
power, and is introduced by Bede as rebelling against 
Edwin in conjunction with Penda, the pagan king of 
Mercia : a battle followed, in which Edwin fell and 
his army was cut to pieces, in the year 6;^^, at a place 
called Hethfeld and Meiceren in the Saxon and Welsh 
chronicles respectively : this spot is supposed to be 
Hatfield, in the neighbourhood of Doncaster. The 
year after, 634, Edwin's son, Osric, then king of 
Deira, tried to besiege Cadwallon in the city of York, 
and was slain with his men in a sally made by the 
Kymry. All Northumbria was then for a whole year 

1 Skene's *' Anc. Bks of Wales," ii p. 206. 
» See the " Myv. Arch.," Triads i. 75, ii 41, 60 (vol. ii. pp. 16, 
22) ; see also Skene's " Anc. Bks. of Wales," ii. pp. 277-9, 442. 



THE KYMRY. 1 33 

under Cadwallon, who now killed Eanfrith, ^thel- 
frith's son, that had been in exile during Edwin's 
reign, and had come back after his death to be 
king of Bernicia. This was followed by Eanfrith's 
brother, Oswald, collecting a force and giving Cad- 
wallon battle, in which the Angle won a great 
victory at a place called Hefenfelth and Catscaul 
by Bede and Nennius respectively. It was fought 
near the Roman Wall and the present town of 
Hexham in 635, and both those writers and the 
Welsh Chronicle assert that Cadwallon there met 
with his death, though the more legendary tra- 
ditions of the Welsh speak of him as living many 
years afterwards. Under his son and successor, 
Cadwaladr, the Kymry seem to have continued to 
act with Penda of Mercia against Northumbria, 
of which both kingdoms were now ruled by Oswald. 
This contest resulted in 642 in a battle, which 
proved Oswald's last, at a place called Maserfelth 
by Bede, but Cocboy by Nennius and the Welsh 
Chronicle. Bernicia and Deira became again sepa- 
rate kingdoms, the former under Oswiu, a brother of 
Oswald, and the latter under Oswine, a cousin of 
Edwin ; but Oswiu got rid of Oswine by foul means 
and possessed himself of both kingdoms. He could, 
however, get no peace from Penda, who is said to 
have been bent on extirpating the Northumbrians : 
according to Bede, he was offered royal ornaments 
and gifts innumerable by Oswiu, if he would go home 
and leave off harassing his people, while Nennius, 
in a somewhat confused account of this transaq- 



134 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

tion, goes further, and would lead one to the following 
conclusions — that Penda and the kings of the Brythons 
had led a large army to the neighbourhood of the 
Firth of Forth against Oswiu, who seems to have had 
the Picts of that region then subject to him ; that Oswiu 
found himself forced to withdraw into a place which 
Nennius calls ludeu (whereby he may have meant 
either Carr-iden or Edin-burgh^), and eventually to give 
up to Penda, as the price of peace, all the treasure and 
booty which he had there with him. This was distri- 
buted by the Mercian king among the kings of the 
Brythons, and Nennius gives us to understand that it 
was known in Welsh as Atbret ludeu, or the restitution 
of ludeu. But soon afterwards came the end, in the year 
655, at the great battle of Winwsed, or, according to 
Nennius, the slaughter of Gai's Field, which would seem 
from its name to have been in the Pictish part of 
Manaw. There Penda is stated by Bede to have had 
thirty legions under the command of most noted 
leaders : nevertheless, the result was that they were 
defeated, and that Penda was slain then or soon after, 
for Oswiu is represented as now ending the war 
in the region of Loidis, after most of the princes 
helping Penda had fallen. According, however, to 
Nennius, the king of Gwynedd, whom he calls Cada- 
vael, had escaped with his army by night, which may 
have been the cause of Penda's defeat, and which 
certainly gained for the Welsh prince the nickname of 

1 Nennius's " Urbeni qucB vacatur ludeu " may have been 
in the original, say, Caer or Diln ludenn : see " The Welsh 
People," pp. 115, 116, 



THE KYMRY, I35 

Cadavael Cadommedd, or the battle-seizer who battle 
declines. Who he was is not known, but it may be 
guessed that he represented a Goidelic element hostile 
to Cadwaladr ; for the name Cadavael, which is not a 
common one, is found borne by a man said in one of 
the Triads^ to have killed lago, Cadwaladr's great- 
grandfather. He is not heard of after the war with 
Oswiu ; and all that is known with tolerable certainty 
about Cadwaladr is that he died during a plague which 
raged in Britain in the year 664; still some of the Welsh 
legends represent him as not dying till the 20th day of 
April, 689, at Rome, a date taken from what appears 
to be the true account of Ceadwalla, king of Wessex. 
After his victory, Oswiu grew in power and became 
ruler of the Mercians for three years after Penda's 
death, as he also did of other English peoples towards 
the south of the island ; not to mention that Bede 
speaks of his subjecting the greater part of the nation 
of the Picts to the sway of the Angles. As regards 
the Kymry, their state in its older and wider sense 
had now practically come to an end. after a history 
extending over more than two centuries. 

In the struggle between the Kymry and the 
Angles after the battle of Chester, the kings of 
Gwynedd, doubtless, considered that both their dig- 
nity and their power were at stake. These are spoken 
of in Welsh literature as the Crown of Britain ; for 
the Dux Britanniarum had not only passed into the 
Gwledig of Britain, but the latter had come to be spoken 

1 See the " Myvyrian Arch.," Triads iii. 48 (vol. ii., p. 405) j 
also Triads i. 76, iii, 26 (vol. ii., pp. 393, 403). 



136 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

of as king or monarch of Britain. This last title would 
seem to have begun to come into use before the middle 
of the sixth century, when Gildas described Maelgwn 
as insulm-is draco or the island dragon, the island 
being probably Britain, and not Mona, as is 
sometimes supposed : here we have an early 
instance of the habit so common in Welsh poetry 
of calling a king or great leader a dragon, as 
when a mythical Gwledig of Lower Britain is always 
called Uthr Bendragon, or Uthr Head-dragon, the 
reputed father of King Arthur. The Welsh words 
are dmig and dragon, which, like the English 
dragon, take us back to the Latin draco, draconis, a 
dragon, and these in their turn to the Augustan era 
of the Roman empire, when dragons^ began to 
figure in purple on the standards of some of the 
legions and to be borne before mih'tary leaders : the 
custom then extended itself to the emperors in 
time of peace ; and the Welsh words make it highly 
probable that the practice was among the Roman 
traditions cherished by the Kymric gwledigs or over- 
kings, whom the bards sometimes styled Kessar- 
ogion"^ or Coesarians, and men of Roman descent ; 
we need not look elsewhere for the explanation of 
the fact that the Red Dragon, which figures in the 
story of Vortigern and Merlin, has always been the 
favourite flag of Wales. From the Maelgwn of Gildas 
we now come to Bede's Cadwallon, whom that his- 

1 See the elaborate article and the copious references, s. v. 
draco, in Ducange's Die. (Paris, 1842). 

2 Skene's " Ancient Books of Wales." ii. p. 212. 



THE KYMRY. I37 

torian usually styles rex Brettonum^ or king of the 
Brythons, though he once approaches the old technical 
title of the ducatus or leadership by speaking of him as 
Brettonum dux} According to the legends put together 
by Geoffrey of Monmouth, this title was an important 
point in the dispute between Cadwallon and Edwin : 
the latter is represented as demanding the former's 
permission to wear a diadem in the east of the island 
as Cadwallon was wont to do in the west, and to cele- 
brate the great festivals as he did. These words contain 
an allusion to the fixed meetings at which the feudal 
lord received the homage of his men. There is probably 
some truth in Geoffrey's account, and it is in harmony 
with the fact that Edwin solved the difficulty by 
driving Cadwallon out of Britain, and the latter in his 
turn by taking the government of Northumbria into his 
own hands for a while after Edwin's death. It is also 
in a measure corroborated by Bede's words about the 
seven English kings who exercised a sort of leadership 
beyond the limits of their own kingdoms. He draws 
no formal distinction between them, while an eighth is 
added to their number (in the person of Ecgbyrht, the 
first king of all England) in the Saxon Chronicle, the 
manuscripts of which give them all the same title, 
whether it be Bretenanwealda or Brytenwealda, that 
is to say, Britain-wielder or ruler of Britain, or else 
Bretwalda,2 which meant Britain-wielder, ruler of the 

1 Bede's " Hist. Ecc," iii. chap. i. 

- Bretwalda is the form in the oldest MS., and its meaning 
is clearly seen in the longer Bretenanwealda : the latter part of 
this is anwealda, a lord, which is accordingly found applied 



138 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

Brythons, or Brettonwn Dux as Bede has called 
Cadwallon. The leadership, already mentioned, of 
the first four kings in Bede's list was exercised in 
Lower Britain as a continuation, probably, of the 
office of the Gwledig who succeeded the Count of the 
Saxon Shore, and there is no reason to think that it 
was actually known as that of Bretwalda or Bryten- 
wealda : it survives possibly in the functionary called 
the Warden of the Cinque Ports. The title of Bret- 
walda was most likely an exclusively Northumbrian 
title assumed first by Edwin after conquering the over- 
king of the Kymry in the person of Cadwallon, and 
then by the other Northumbrian kings, Oswald and 
Oswiu. Here it may be remarked that in walda^ 
wealda^ anwealda^ we have early English words which 
happen to be of the same meaning and etymology as 
the Welsh gwledig^ or uletic as it would probably be 
treated in the seventh century : this makes it hard to 
avoid thinking that the English were in some measure 

to the Almighty ; it was otherwise written anwalda, 
onwcalda, &c. Nor is it to be severed from anweald or 
onweald, dominion, authority, power : see Sweet's *' Anglo- 
Saxon Reader," pp. 4, 27, 120. But it does not follow that 
the scribes of the later MSS. were merely guessing the signifi- 
cation of the Bretwalda of the earlier MS., for they were not 
wholly without other sources — witness their Conmcegl and 
Farinmcegl, as compared with the much later forms in the 
oldest existing MS. and with Bede's Brocmailus, The old- 
fashioned explanations that aimed at dissociating Breteii, 
Bryten, and Bret, from Britain and Britons^ were forced, and 
dictated by the wish to keep clear of what was thought a 
historical difficulty ; see the New English Dictionary, s.v, 
Bretwalda, 



THE KYMRY. 1 39 

guided in their choice of these terms by that which 
was in use among the Welsh. It is further worthy of 
note that Edwin was the first Enghsh prince described 
as wont to have, according to Bede's^ account, a 
standard borne before him wherever he rode, as was 
the habit of the Caesars of Rome, and probably also 
of the Csesarians of the Kymry after them and 
their example : what device Edwin had on his, 
whether it was, like theirs, a red dragon or not, 
we have no means of knowing ; nor can we stay to 
inquire whether the tuft carried before him when he 
was pleased to walk consisted of a triad of plumes 
used in the same way by the Gwledig, and to be 
regarded as forming a middle term between the 
insignia of office of the Dux Britanniarum and the 
Prince of Wales's Feathers. 

The disgrace the Kymry felt at losing the Crown 
of Britain, whatever that somewhat indefinite expres- 
sion implied, was probably nothing in comparison with 
their bitterness at being robbed of one piece after an- 
other of their country. We have already alluded to 
Edwin annexing Loidis and Elmet to his own 
kingdom of Deira ; but far more fatal to Kymric inde- 
pendence was the appropriation by the Angles of the 
district of Teyrnllwg, described by Welsh tradition^ as 
reaching from the Dee to the forests of Cumberland 
and the neighbourhood of the Derwent, which was 
once the boundary of the diocese of Chester : the tract 
consisting of the level part of Cheshire and South 
Lancashire must have been taken from the Kymry 
» "Hist. Eccl.," ii. 16. ^ lolo MSS., p. S6. 



140 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

soon after, possibly before, the battle of Chester. Their 
loss of the plains of Teyrnllwg cut their state in two, 
and everything was calculated to rouse them to the 
highest pitch of fury and to the utmost exertion to rid 
themselves of their encroaching neighbours, to both of 
which Welsh poetry abundantly testifies. The struggle, 
of which the bards continued to sing ^ long afterwards, 
was no longer a struggle for mere glory ; it had become 
an effort on the part of their race to expel the Angles 
from the country and to drive the Ellmyn or Alle- 
mans, as they were sometimes termed, bag and bag- 
gage into their ships in quest of another home. It 
is in the heated atmosphere of this period that one 
can realise how closely the parts of the Kymric state 
clung together, and what a cruel wrench it was felt to 
be when it was torn in two ; and it is only in the lurid 
light of this all but forgotten context that one can 
read what the Brython meant, who first found that 
name too vague and began to call himself a Kymro, 
that is to say, Cym-bro (Combrox) or compatriot, the 
native of the country, the rightful owner of the soil, 
which he thought it his duty to hold against the Ail-fro 
(Allobrox), as he called the invader who came from 
another land, the devastating foreigner with whose 
head the fierce muse of his time and race loved to 
behold him playing football. Neither was this fire 
of hostility towards the intruder confined to the 
Kymry, for it seems more than once to have been 
spread by them to the other Celts,i from whom the 

1 See for instance Skene's "Ancient Bks. of Wales," ii. pp. 
123-9, 



THE ICYMRY. 141 

bards represent them as drawing active assistance — 
from the Brythons of Dumnonia and Armorica, from 
the Goidels of Dublin and Scotland ; nor does it by 
any means appear improbable that all these peoples, 
excepting perhaps those of Armorica, were repre- 
sented in the motley host led by Penda of Mercia 
to the North, when the curtain fell on the closing 
scene of Oswiu's victory and Cadavael's inglorious 
flight in 655. 

From that time, or rather from the occupation by 
the English of the plain of the Dee and the Mersey, 
the Kymry dwelt in two lands, known in late Latin 
as Cambria, in Welsh Cyinrii^ which denotes the 
Principality of Wales, and Cumbria or the king- 
dom of Cumberland ; but for a considerable time 
previously their territory must have been dangerously 
narrowed in the direction of those rivers, for even 
Ceawlin of Wessex had carried his conquests along the 
eastern bank of the Severn into the heart of what 
is now Shropshire, leaving on his right a peninsula of 
Kymric country, reaching probably to the Avon : this 
was afterwards acquired by the English tribes of Mercia 
as the result of many a minor struggle lost to history, 
though a careful study of place-names in that district 
might still perhaps enable one to form an idea of the 
spots where the old inhabitants were able to hold their 
ground. As to the country west of the Severn, the kings 
of Wessex appear to have made incursions into South 
Wales from time to time, and possibly gained a per- 

1 See among others the poems in Skene's "Anc. Bks. of 
Wales," ii. pp. 205-13. 



142 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

manent footing on the west bank of that river ; but 
it was not till the time of Offa that the English 
frontier was materially advanced towards the west. 
He reigned over Mercia from 755 to 794, and made 
it the first pov/er in Britain ; besides his conflicts with 
the other EngUsh states, he had many wars with the 
Kymry west of the Severn, especially during the last 
twenty years of his reign. He encroached on them, 
and they retaHated by ravaging his country ; so he had 
an earthen rampart built from the mouth of the Wye 
to the estuary of the Dee, to divide Mercia from 
Wales : thus he severed from the latter a very con- 
siderable tract of country, including a large part of 
Powys, with the important town of Pengwern, which 
became English with its name translated into Shrews- 
bury. Thus the southern Cambria shrank into the 
Wales of our day, in which we include the county of 
Monmouth, and, roughly speaking, Offa's Dyke is 
still regarded as the boundary between England and 
Wales, though few remains of it are now to be seen. 

We have thus rapidly followed the southern Kymry 
into Wales, and we should now leave them, but that 
a word or two touching their history there may serve 
to give its full meaning to what we have already said 
about the nature of their state before Oswiu's vic- 
tory. From that time very little is known of them 
for nearly a century, and it has therefore been sup- 
posed that for a considerable portion of that interval 
they were under the domination of the English. 
But, when at length we read a little more about them, 
we find them still ruled by kings of the race of 



THE KYMRY. 1 43 

Maelgwn ; and the Welsh Chronicle in recording, 
in the year 754, the death of Rhodri, grandson of 
Cadwaladr, styles him Rex Brittonum, or king of the 
Brythons. His son, Kynan, left a daughter only, who 
was married to Mervyn, said to have come, like Cun- 
edda, from Manaw in the North. Mervyn became king 
of all Wales, and was followed by his son, Rhodri the 
Great, who was also king of all Wales, till his death 
in 877. Rhodri divided Wales between his three sons 
and made arrangements for the eldest to be over-king : 
that dignity may possibly, even in the period of 
confusion which followed the death, in the year 948, of 
Rhodri's grandson, Howel the Good, have had charm 
enough to make " confusion worse confounded." 
What with the wars of the Welsh princes with the 
EngUsh, with, the Danes, and with one another, the 
web of Kymric history after the Norman Conquest is 
not easy to disentangle ', but the kingdom of the 
Welsh is sometimes spoken of as having finally 
fallen in 1091, when Rhys ab Tewdwr was slain in 
battle by the Normans, who seized on most of South 
Wales. In time it ceased to be the custom to speak 
of a Welsh leader who rose above his peers, as king 
of the Brythons, or even king of all Wales, a title 
which made way for that of Prince of Wales. 
That was the case, for instance, when the death 
of Llewelyn, the last Prince of Wales in any 
sense descended from Maelgwn and Cunedda, 
opened the way for the King of England to juggle 
the title into his son's lap. To go back to an 
earlier and more interesting fact, not only did the 



144 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

bards continue for ages to sing the praises of the 
Welsh princes who protected them, in such terms 
as had ceased to be applicable from the time of Cad- 
waladr, but we meet with a curious relic of the same 
past state of things in the tenth century edition of the 
Welsh Laws, where they specify certain occasions on 
which the Household bard of the King of Gwynedd 
was to sing before his hosts a lay of which the subject 
only is given : it was the significant one of the 
Monarchy of Britain, ^ the last indistinct echo of the 
long-forgotten office of the Dux Britanniarum. 

We must now say a few words about the other 
Cambria or Cumbria, for in point of origin we have 
but one and the same word in both forms. Kambria 
was regularly used for Wales by such writers as 
Giraldus in the twelfth century, and Geoffrey somewhat 
earher had found an eponymous hero called Kamber 
to account for it, just as he likewise had ready to 
his hand a Locrinus ^ to explain Lloegr, the Welsh 
word for England south of the Humber, and 
Albanactus to be the ancestor of the Albanach, 
the Gaels of Alban or Celtic Scotland. The 
fashion was not yet established of distinguishing 
between Cambria and Cumbria as we do. Thus 
St. Petroc, who was probably a native of Wales, is in 
one ancient life ^ called a Cumber, according to an- 
other version, a Cimber. On the other hand Joceline, 

' Vol. i. p. 34. 

' This is the Locrine of Milton's " Comus," which see. 
^ See Capgi-ave's "Legenda Anglise," p. 266; and the 
" Acta Sanct.," June 4, i. p. 400. 



THE KYMRY. 1 45 

who wrote his life of St. Kentigern in the tw^elfth 
century, speaks of the land of the Northern Kymry or 
Cumbria, as Cambria, and uses the adjectives Cam- 
brensis and Cambrinus accordingly ; and ^Ethelweard 
in his chronicle, written in Latin about the end of the 
tenth century, mentions the Northern Kymry under 
the name of Cumbri. So it may be supposed that 
both countries of the Kymry were for some time 
called Cambria and Cumbria indifferently, the Welsh 
word on which they are based being, as now written 
Cymrn, which denotes exclusively the Principality, 
and is there pronounced nearly as an Englishman 
would treat it if spelled Kumry. It is needless, 
therefore, to say that Cambria is a less correct form 
of the word than Cumbria, and that, in the language 
of the Saxon Chronicle, it became Cumerland or 
Cumberland^ and also Cumbraland — the land, as it 
were, of the Cui?ibras, the Cumbri or Kymry. The 
latter consisted in the North of a considerable number 
of small tribes, many of the princes of which claimed 
descent from Coel or from a Roman ancestor, and 
among them some from the Maximus who succeeded 
for a time in possessing himself of the imperial throne 
of Rome. The relations in which the former usually 
stood to one another and to the Gwledig cannot 
clearly be made out, but their wars were mostly 
directed against the Angles of Bernicia, while Urien, 
Rhydderch, and others who warred with Hussa, 
king of Bernicia from 567 to 574, figure very con- 
spicuously in old Welsh poetry : later Urien and his 
sons are represented as also fighting with valour 

L 



146 CELTIC BEITAIN. 

and varying success against Theodric, who reigned 
over Bernicia from 580 to 587. He was probably 
the devastator known in Welsh literature as the 
Flame-bringer.^ 

Hitherto Carlisle had no doubt been far the most 
important town of these Northern Cumbrians ; but, in 
consequence of a great battle fought by their princes 
with one another in the year 573, that city found 
much of its importance shifted to a more northern 
point. The conflict took place at Arderydd, 
identified by some with the Knows of Arthuret, 
on the banks of the Esk, about nine miles from 
Carlisle, and by others with Airdrie, in Lanark. 
The cause of the war is not evident, but the 
prince who issued victorious, with the aid probably 
of the Gwledig, was Rhydderch : he thereupon 
fixed his headquarters on a rock in the Clyde, 
called in Welsh Alclud, whence it was known to 
the English for a time as Alclyde, but the Goidels 
called it Diinbrettan or the fortress of the Brythons, 
which has prevailed in the slightly modified form of 
Dumbarton. The fact that Rhydderch, after firmly 
establishing himself there, prevailed on Kentigern 
to return from Wales to take the primacy of that 
district as bishop of Glasgow, also contributed even- 
tually in some measure to the importance of that 
part of Cumbria. For a long time after Oswiu's 
victory the Cumbrians, like the other Kymry, 
remained under English domination ; but at length, 
in the year 685 Oswiu's son, Ecgfrith, the king of 
' See Skene's '' Anc. Books of Wales," ii. pp. 189, 199. 



THE KYMRY. T47 

Northumbria, was defeated and slain at Diin Nech- 
tain, supposed to be Dunnichen in Forfarshire. The 
Angles only retained their power over the Picts of 
Galloway and the Cumbrians south of the Solway, 
together with the city of Carlisle, which Ecgfrith 
shortly before his death had given to St. Cuthberht, 
with some of the land around it. The Cumbrians 
north of the Solway became independent, and had 
kings of their own again, of whom one is recorded as 
dying in 694, and another in 722. But, the Picts 
of Galloway continuing under the yoke of the 
Northumbrians, the king of the latter managed in 
750 to annex to Galloway the district adjoining it 
on the north and west, which was then a part of the 
land of the Cumbrians, though it may have long 
before belonged to the Picts. In the same year a 
war took place between the former and the Picts of 
Lothian, who suffered a defeat and lost their leader, 
Talargan, brother to the King of Alban, in a battle 
at a place called Mocetauc in the Welsh Chronicle, 
and supposed to be in the parish of Strathblane in 
the county of Stirling ; but in 756 we read of the 
Picts and the Northumbrians joining, and pressing the 
Cumbrians sorely. Afterwards little is known of them 
(except that Alclyde was more than once destroyed 
by the Norsemen) until we come down to the end 
of the ninth century, as to which we meet with a 
Welsh tradition that the Cumbrians who refused 
to submit to the English were received by the 
King of Gwynedd wto the part of North Wales lying 
between the Dee and the Clwyd, from which they 

L 2 



148 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

are represented as driving out some English settlers 
who had established themselves there. How much 
truth there may be in this story is not evident, 
but it is open to the suspicion of being based to 
some extent on the false etymology which identifies 
the name of the Clwyd with that of the Clyde. 
It is needless to say that the latter, being Clota in 
Roman times, and Glut in old Welsh, could only 
yield Clud in later Welsh. Harassed and weakened 
on all sides, the Cumbrians ceased to have kings of 
their own race in the early part of the tenth century, 
when a Scottish line of princes established itself at 
Alclyde ; and in 946 the kingdom was conquered by 
the English king Edmund, who bestowed the whole 
of it from the neighbourhood of the Derwent to the 
Clyde on the Scottish king Maelcoluim or Malcolm, 
on condition that he should assist him by land and 
sea, the help anticipated being intended against the 
Danes. So Cumbria became what historians are 
pleased to call an appanage of the Scottish crown, 
which led to various complications between the 
English and Scots for a considerable time afterwards. 
Into these we cannot enter, and it will suffice to say 
that William the Red made the southern part of 
Cumbria, including the city of Carlisle, an earl- 
dom for one of his barons. Thus it came to 
pass that the name of Cumberland has ever since 
had its home on the English side of the border, 
while the northern portion, of which the basin of the 
Clyde formed such an important part, is spoken of in 
the Saxon Chronicle as that of the Strathclyde Welsh- 



THE KYMRY. 1 49 

men. It may here be added that this last was still 
more closely joined to the Scottish crown when David 
became king in 1124; but its people, who formed a 
distinct battalion of Cumbrians and Teviotdale men 
in the Scottish army at the battle of the Standard in 
IT 30, preserved their Kymric characteristics long 
afterwards. How late the Welsh language lingered 
between the Mersey and the Clyde we have, however, 
no means of discovering, but, to judge from a passage 
in the Welsh Triads, it may be surmised to have been 
spoken as late as the fourteenth century in the district 
of Carnoban,! wherever between Leeds and Dum- 
barton that may turn out to have been. 

' See the " Myvyrian Archaiology," Triad iii. 7 (ii. p. 58). 



150 CELTIC BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 

To the remarks made in the last chapter on the Picts 
of Galloway, we may add, that we read of the Bry- 
thon, whom Bede calls Nynias, labouring to convert 
them to Christianity about 412, and building a church 
dedicated to St. Martin, at a place calle'd in the Saxon 
Chronicle Hwiterne, now Whitehorne, Whithern, or 
Whithorn, in the south-eastern part of AV'igtonshire. 
They were, as a rule, little disposed to be friendly 
towards their Brythonic neighbours, but they appear, 
nevertheless, to have taken part with them in the war 
against Oswiu, when, as the result of his triumph, 
they became subject to the Northumbrians, who pro- 
ceeded to incorporate their country with their own 
kingdom. Nor did the defeat and death of Ecgfrith 
in 685 enable them to free themselves; for the 
Northumbrians are found to have set up a bishopric 
at Whithorn in 727, and Bede speaks of a man, 
whose name was Pecthelm, acting as their bishop there 
in 731 ;^ the bishopric, however, seems to have ended 
with another, whose name was Beadwolf, in the year 
796 or thereabouts. This marks the beginning of a 
time when the hold of the Angles on Galloway grew 
feeble, and Northumbria itself fell into a state of con- 

1 "Hist. Eccl.," V. 23. 



THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. I51 

siderable disorder and confusion. But Galloway and 
Northumbria remained connected, after a fashion, 
a long time afterwards — probably until the former was 
bestowed with Cumbria on the king of the Scots by 
the English king Edmund. Not only did these 
Picts so far retain the individuality of their race as to 
be known by that name as late as the twelfth century, 
and to form a division of King David's army at the 
battle of the Standard, where they claimed the right 
of leading the van of his numerous hosts ; but there is 
no lack of evidence that they still clung, some four 
centuries later, to their Goidelic speech, which Scottish 
authors used to call Ersch or Irische, as they rightly 
identified it with the Celtic language of Ireland and 
the Highlands. 

Allusion has also been made to the Picts on the 
south coast of the Firth of Forth, but a few words 
more must be devoted to them before we pass be- 
yond the bounds of what was once Roman Britain. 
The whole seaboard from the Southern Wall to the 
Lammermoor Hills fell, as already mentioned, into the 
possession of the Angles, but the tract looking seaward 
from that range to where the Avon empties itself into 
the Forth or thereabouts, and commonly known as the 
Lothians, was occupied by a considerable mixture of 
races, as may be gathered from the place-names there. 
Thus the district north of the Lammermoors, forming 
the peninsula over against the county of Fife, would 
seem to have been Celtic, though it is not easy to say 
whether the Goidel or the Brython prevailed there ; 
apparently it was the former. But on the upper course 



15^ CELTIC BRITAIN. 

of the northern Tyne, which drains this region parallel 
to the Lammermoor range, one comes to a place 
called Pencaitland, a name which is, in part at any 
rate, Brythonic. A little higher, however, the head- 
stream of the same Tyne is called Keith Water, not to 
mention the parish there called Keith- Humbie, which, 
together with Dalkeith, between the two Esks, shows 
that we have to do with a district not peopled by 
Brythons ; but by whom ? This is a difficult question, 
as will be seen from the following facts which have to 
be taken together : — The vocable Keith cannot well 
be severed from other place-names into which it 
enters at various points in the east of Scotland from 
Keith Water to Caithness; among these are Inch 
Keith in the Firth of Forth, and Keith Inch at Peter- 
head, the most eastern point of Scotland ; in the 
former, Keith inevitably reminds one of the stronghold 
in the middle of the Firth of Forth, called by Bede 
Urhs Giudi ; and it is, moreover, on record that the 
Irish formerly called the Firth of Forth, the sea of 
Giudan} or of the Giuds, to which may be added that 
the legendary son of the eponymous Cruithne or Pict 
representing Caithness is variously called Cait, Gatt, 
and Got, and that a Welsh form of another Pictish 
name here in point is given by Nennius as Ittdeu, 
already mentioned at page 134 above. We are not 
forced, however, to identify Urbs ludeu with Bede's 
Urbs Giudi, but phonologically they and Giudan seem 
to go together, and not with Keith or Caith. One 
may add to the former a kindred form from the Welsh 
^ Reeves's *'Culdees/' p. 124. 



THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 153 

Chronicle, namely, where it calls Menevia or St. 
David's Moniludeorum. We need not here be troubled 
by the lost Ten Tribes of Israel, but it might be argued 
that under these names we have to do with Jutes, and 
it would be hard to prove the contrary ; but on the 
whole it is probable at all events that we have here 
again to do with a small non-Celtic settlement of some 
kind. To return to the North, the Pictish country 
reached at least from the upper course of the Tyne to 
the range of mountains called after the village of 
Pentland, a name, however, which is probably a cor- 
ruption of a Brythonic Pen-llan. Following their 
direction towards the sea we reach what was once the 
stronghold of the Picts, namely, Edinburgh, which, 
owing to its conquest by Edwin, had its name some- 
times made into Edwinesburg. The inland boundary 
of this Pictish district is indicated by the Brythonic 
name, Penicuik, borne by a place on the upper course 
of the more northern of the two Esks. How far the 
Picts occupied the country beyond the Pentlands is 
not evident, but probably up to the river Almond at 
least. Beyond that we seem to reach a district which 
was in part Brythonic and in part Goidelic. Thus 
we have the former in Carriden (for CaerEden, " Fort 
of Eden ") near Abercorn ; and we detect the latter in 
connection with the place where the northern wall 
ended on the Firth of Forth, which, according to 
Bede, was called Peanuahel or Peanfahel by the Picts, 
and Penneltun by the Angles. The former points back 
to a Latin term penna{e) or ptnna{e) valli^ " wing of the 
^ See Nicholson's ''Keltic Researches" (London, 1904), p. 24. 



154 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

vallum," that is, the pinnacle or turret at the end of 
the wall. The syllable 2/^>^^/ or j^/^^/ represents what 
would be written later in Goidelic fdil^ the genitive of 
fdl^ ' a wall " (in Welsh gwawl). But the position of 
the u or /would force it to be elided sooner or later 
in Goidelic pronunciation, as was done in the Anglian 
Fenel (of Peneltuti) derived from the Goidelic 
name. In modern Irish spelling the latter would 
have been represented as Pean{7i)fhdil^ had the name 
not undergone a further change, that of p into c, 
making it into Ceannfhdil^ and causing it to be 
interpreted henceforth as the " Wall's End." This is 
given in certain of the manuscripts of Nennius as 
Cenail, now written Kinneil. The non-Celtic Picts, 
when we find them coming southwards, seem to have 
been fast adopting the idioms of their Celtic neigh- 
bours ; so the contest of languages in the maritime 
district south of the Forth came in time to be mainly 
between Goidelic and English, which no doubt had a 
footing there in the time of Edwin. Nay, after what 
has been already hinted, it is needless to say, that 
some believe English to have been firmly established 
on that coast as early as in Kent, namely, by a 
branch of the same Jutish people. We are, however, 
by no means sure that this has been satisfactorily 
made out. 

When Edwin became master of the stronghold 
of Edinburgh he probably did so only after reducing 
the whole country between the Lammermoors and 
the Avon, a conquest which may be supposed to have 
made his dominions continuous from the latter river 



THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 1 55 

to the H umber ; but when Penda and his Celtic allies 
appeared in the north most of the non-Anglian inhabi- 
tants of Lothian were probably induced to join them, 
so that Oswiu when he proved victorious not only 
reduced them under his power, but extended his 
conquests to the country beyond the Forth, as the 
Picts there may have taken part with their kins- 
men against him. The yoke of the Angles must have 
been thrown off at the defeat of Ecgfrith in 685. 
After his time we read of battles between them and 
the Angles, and, among others, of one fought in the 
plain of Manaw in the year 710 or 711 : another battle 
is mentioned as having been fought in 729 between 
the Picts from the north of the Forth and the Picts 
of Manaw : afterwards, little is known about the latter 
till the year 844, when the Goidelic element became 
supreme in the North. Now the battle on the plain 
of Manaw is specified as having been fought at a place 
between the rivers Avon and Carron : it serves in 
some measure to fix the position of the region called 
by the Welsh the land of Manaw, and by the Goidels 
Manann, a name which survives in Sla.maHna?t Moor, 
in which the river Avon rises, in the county of 
Linlithgow, and also in Clack;^^;^;^^;^, which suggests 
that another piece of Manaw lay north of the Forth? 
both having possibly been included in the territory 
of the people whom Ptolemy calls Dumnonii. Their 
country touched two salt waters, the Firth of Forth 
and the Firth of Clyde or the Irish Sea. Adjoining 
them, close to the former, was another piece of the 
ancient Manaw, called by the Welsh the Manaw of 



156 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

the Gododin : these were the people known in 
Ptolemy's time as Votadini, and placed on the coast 
from the Firth of Forth to the confines of the land 
which he considered the Brigantes to have inhabited 
as their own. Before leaving this district south of 
the Forth, it may be mentioned that next to nothing 
is known of the relation in which the Picts of Lothian 
and of Galloway stood to their kinsmen in the north : 
an unidentified son of the eponymous •♦Cruithne 
is called Fidach, a name doubtlessly representative of 
the people or region called in Welsh poetry Goddeu : 
it was possibly Lothian but more likely Galloway ; 
for we seem to detect a cognate of Fidach or Goddeu 
in the latter part of the name of Galloway as Latinized 
into Galwadia^. This has usually been derived by 
main force from Gall-Gaedhel^ the name which the 
Irish in later times gave the Picts of Galloway, 
whereby they meant to describe them as Goidels or 
Gaels who adhered or submitted to the Gall or the 
stranger who came on his piratic visits from Denmark 
or the fiords of Norway, rather than with any allusion, 
as it is supposed, to the Anglian stranger who ruled 
that district as a province of his own for a long time. 

We must now go beyond the limits of what was 
once Roman Britain, and say something of the Picts 
who remained outside the Northern Wall : it will 
lead to somewhat less complication if we speak first 
very briefly of the Scots who settled in Britain. They 
took up their abode in Cantyre and the island of 
Islay, the part of Ireland from which they came being 
^ Mommsen's " Chronica Minora," iii. p. 19. 



THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 1 57 

the nearest district to Cantyre and known as that of 
Dal-Riada. The migration began during the last 
years of the fifth century, under a prince called 
Fergus mac Ercae ; and it was not long before the 
new comers spread themselves over much of what is 
now known as Argyle. They were then separated 
from the Picts north of the Forth by the great 
mountain chain which forms a part of the boundary 
of the west of Perthshire, and used to be termed 
Dorsum Britannice or Drumalban, which means 
the ridge of Britain or Alban. The king of 
the Picts, whose name was Brude Mac Maelchon, 
drove them back about the year 560 to Cantyre, 
and slew their king. I'he Scots were Christians, 
while the Picts ruled over by Brude were still 
pagans; and it is supposed that the mission of 
St. Columba to Brude's court had as one of its 
objects the bettering of the position of the Scots as 
against their powerful neighbours. Columba, who was 
connected with the royal family ot the Dalriad Scots, 
came over from Ireland in the year 563, and made 
the islet of lona, near the coast of the island of Mull, 
the home of himself and his followers shortly after- 
wards : he succeeded in converting Brude and his 
Pictish subjects to Christianity; but it does not 
seem to have prevented their further pressing the 
Scots, whom we read of as losing their king and 
many of his followers in a battle fought in Cantyre 
in 574. St. Columba at this point interfered in 
the succession, and chose as king of the Scots a 
great-grandson of Fergus mac Ercae, whose name was 



158 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

Aedan, and then lie took him to Ireland to a meeting 
known as the Council of Drumcett, where he obtained 
the concession that the Dalriad Scots of Britain 
should no longer have to pay taxes or tribute to the 
mother state in Ireland, though they were to continue 
bound to take part in her hostings and expeditions. 
So Aedan became the first independent king of the 
Scots, and he appears to have strengthened his 
position by bringing a fresh colony back with him 
from Ireland, and we read of him and Baetan mac 
Cairill, king of the Dal-Fiatach^ and over-king of 
Ulster, driving the English out of Manaw, the 
over-kingship of which is said by Irish tradition 
to have belonged to Baetan. He died in 581, and 
two years later Manaw was left by the Goidels, 
which seems to mean that the forces from Ireland 
left Aedan to carry on the contest alone with the 
English, that is to say, the Angles of Bernicia ; so we 
read of him fighting a battle about this time in 
Manaw, though nothing is known about it, excepting 
that it ended in his favour. Next we learn from 
Adamnan, who wrote the biography of St. Columba 
in the seventh century, that Aedan fought a great battle 
in which several of his sons fell, in what Adamnan 
calls the war of the Miati or Miathi f this battle, in 
which he ascribes a dearly-bought victory to Aedan, 
is otherwise known as that of Circinn, which took 
place in 596 : this can hardly have been the Circinn 

^ Another warlike tribe of the north-eastern corner of Ireland, 
located in what is now the county of Down. 

2 Reeve's *' Adamnan's Life of Columba/' pp. 33, 36, 



THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 159 

of Magh-Girginn, "plain of Circinn," the name of 
which was reduced to Moerne, and Mernis or Mearns 
in broad Scotch. That seems too far from the 
people of the Mseatse : the Mearns are now, roughly 
speaking, represented by Kincardineshire. Later we 
find Aedan again helped by soldiers from Ireland 
under Maelumi, the son of Baetan, namely, at the. 
great battle which was fought in 603, at a place called 
by Bedel Degsastan, supposed by some to have been 
Dawstone near Jedburgh, and by others Dalston near 
Carlisle, if not Dawstone Rigg in Liddesdale. Aedan 
had a very large army, consisting of his Scots, the 
Picts of Manaw, and his allies from Ireland, and it is 
not improbable that the Brythons of Cumbria had 
readily joined him in a great struggle against the Angles 
whose king was the aggressive yEthelfrith, of whom 
we have already spoken ; but he obtained a complete 
victory over Aedan and his combined forces. Aedan 
died in 606 ; he was a Dalriad Scot, but something 
more, for he is traditionally said to have been the son 
of a daughter of Brychan, the ancestor of one of the 
three holy families of Welsh hagiology, who is sup- 
posed to have left his name to Brycheiniog or Breck- 
nock. It is by no means clear what the object of all 
Aedan's wars may have been, but it would, perhaps, be 
not far wrong to assume that they were mainly directed 
against the Angles and the Picts beyond the Forth 
and Clyde. Aedan's sons took a more or less active 
part in the affairs of Ireland, and so did his grandson 
Domnall Brecc or the Freckled : the latter also 
1 " Hist. Eccl.," i. chap. 34. 



l6o CELTIC BRITAIN. 

fought several battles in Britain. One of these obscure 
conflicts took place in 634 at a place called Calitros, 
or Calathros, Latinised Calabria, and supposed to 
have been somewhere between the Carron and the 
Avon. In 638 we read of Etan (either Edin- 
burgh or Carriden) as undergoing siege and of 
another attempt made by Domnall, who was again 
defeated. On what terms he had hitherto been with 
the Brythons of Cumbria we do not know, but at that 
time a war took place between him and them, in 
which they were victorious, and he was slain in the 
upper part of the vale of the Carron. The kingdom 
of the Dalriad Scots of Argyle seems to have never 
flourished much after this time. 

As to the Picts or,Picti, their name, referring as it 
would seem to do, to the habit of colouring the body 
which prevailed among them after it had disappeared 
in most of the country under the Romans, was never, 
perhaps, distinctive of race, as Brythons and Goidels 
seem to have been sometimes included under it as well 
as the non-Celtic natives to whom the term probably 
applied most strictly at all times. So historians 
speak geographically of these peoples as northern and 
southern Picts, meaning by the latter the dwellers of 
the districts stretching from the Forth to the neigh- 
bourhood of Aberdeen and drained by the Forth, the 
Tay, and the two northern Esks. Its inland boundary 
may be described as a sort of semi-circle of mountains, 
comprising the Mounth or that portion of the 
Grampians which runs across the country and ends 
near Stonehaven, on the north, and Drumalban on the 



THE PICTS AND SCOTS. l6l 

west, beyond which dwelt those whom it has been 
customary to call the northern Picts, excepting that 
the Dalriad Scots had taken possession of a pait of 
Argyle from the end of the fifth century : it is more 
accurate to speak of them as the Picts on this side of 
the mountains and those beyond them. Now, the 
former, in the loose sense here suggested, were partly 
Celtic and partly non-Celtic, while the Celtic element 
was of two kinds, Brythonic and Goidelic ; for, when 
the earlier Celtic invaders, the Goidels, had presumably 
seized on the best portions of the island, their 
northern territory on the eastern sea-board may even 
have included most of the Lowland district drained by 
the Tay and the rivers that join it. A long time 
afterwards the other Celts — those of the Brythonic 
branch — came and drove the Goidels before them, as 
the latter had done with the aborigines. There is no 
evidence, however, that they had coasted beyond the 
Firth of Forth, though there is that they got possession 
of a good deal of country north-east of the river. The 
outlying tribes of the Dumnonii had pushed them- 
selves as far as the skirts of the great Caledonian 
forest, and laid claim to most of the tract probably 
between the Forth and the Perthshire Almond, in- 
cluding the northern slope of the Ochils. Ptolemy 
assigns to them three towns, Alauna, which may 
haveb een at Ardoch near the Allan ; Lindon, sup- 
posed to have been at Delginross, near Comrie, on 
the Earn ; and Victoria, possibly situated at Stra- 
geath on the same river. These tribes were probably 
the Verturiones of ancient authors, and their name 

M 



1 62 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

yielded that of the Men of Fortrenn of Pictish history, 
which gives them Menteith, Strathearn, and Fothreve, 
or the western portion of Fife. They were probably 
a mixture of Dumnonian Brythons and Picts, and 
had around them on the north and east a zone of 
Goidelic territory comprising, perhaps, a portion of 
Athol in the Perthshire highlands, and Gowrie on the 
north of the Tay. The north-east corner of this 
Cismontane Pictland, the region of the twin Esks, 
belonged to those of the aboriginal Picts, whom Ptolemy 
calls Vernicomes; and in later times there is no 
certain evidence for extending the territory of the 
Mseatse, Adamnan's Miati, to cover any part of that 
country. It is mostly known in history as the Mearns, 
to which may be added probably most of the province 
of Angus. The two correspond pretty nearly to the 
counties of Forfar and Kincardine respectively. 
This land, from Stonehaven to Stirling, and from 
Drumalban to the North Sea, with its three contend- 
ing races of Brythons, Goidels, and non-Celtic Picts, 
is the theatre where most of the known history of the 
Pictish kingdom was acted. 

The Pictish kingdom, we said, for historians are 
wont to speak of it in the singular ; and, on the 
whole, the facts of the case warrant it, especially if 
the head of it be looked at as an Ard-ri or high-king, 
holding a position somewhat like the Gwledig among 
the Kymry. Moreover, the kingdom is rightly called 
Pictish, and not Goidelic or Brythonic : this leads 
us to the question as to its probable origin, and as to 
what became of the Caledonians, who were the most 



THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 1 63 

powerful people that Agricola and his legions met 
with in the north. Agricola found and fought the 
Caledonians on the banks of the Tay. But it may be 
doubted that any part of that district below Dunkeld 
belonged to them ; and, for some reason or other, 
they seem not long afterwards to disappear lost in the 
background. This may have begun with the tremen- 
dous defeat the Roman general was able to inflict on 
them in the year S6, for it probably gave a rival 
people that had not taken part in the war with the 
legions, or taken only a subordinate part, the start it 
wanted in the race for the foremost place in inde- 
pendent Britain. From Tacitus we gather that those 
who benefited by the disaster to the Caledonians 
were not the Boresti, or any people between the Tay 
and Forth, for their country had most likely been 
overrun ; and Agricola took hostages from them on 
his return from the banks of the Tay ; but it was the 
people called the Vacomagi, who ranged from the land 
occupied by the Goidels of the Tay basin to the 
Moray Firth. And on this point something may be 
learnt from Ptolemy's Geography, which was published 
about thirty-four years after the great defeat of the 
Caledonians in 86. Beyond the Dumnonii, whose 
outposts reached the neighbourhood of the Perthshire 
Almond, and between the former and the Moray 
Firth he locates only three peoples, and of these 
far the most widely spread was that of the 
Vacomagi. Their country, as far as can be made 
out from the data he supplies, extended from 
the river Ness to the upper course of the Dee 



164 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

and the Don, and from the Moray Firth into the 
heart of Perthshire. He gives them four towns : 
the first, called the Winged Camp, is supposed to 
have been on the promontory of Burghead on the 
south side of the Moray Firth ; the second, called 
Tuessis, near Boharm, on the Spey ; the third, called 
Tamea, on an island in the Tay called Inchtuthill ; 
and the fourth, called Banatia, at Buchanty, on the 
Almond. The most eastern point of Scotland is 
called by Ptolemy Tsexalon, and the people of that 
district were the Tsexali, the bulk of whose territory 
is represented by the modern county of Aberdeen : 
they had a town called Devana, which has been 
supposed to have stood in the strath of the Dee, near 
the Pass of Ballater, and close to Loch Daven. The 
rest of the eastern coast Ptolemy leaves to the people 
whom he calls Vernicomes or Venicones, and who 
thus overlap with the Maeatae of later authors : the 
former's country, at that time, would seem to have 
comprised Mearn, Angus, and the east of Fife ; while 
their town, called Orrea, appears to have been on the 
Fifeshire Eden, unless it was still more south, some- 
where near the confluence of the Orr with the Leven, 
not very far from the Firth of Forth. In the main 
we take all those peoples to have been non-Celtic, 
and their territory would seem to have surrounded 
that of the Goidels of old standing in the Tay valley, 
whence the influence of the latter people spread at 
length as far as Athol. Ptoleniy makes the 
Caledonians extend across the island from the 
neighbourhood of Loch Fyne to the Beauly Firth^ 



THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 165 

with the territory of the Vacomagi stretching parallel 
to theirs from the river Almond to where Burghead 
looks across the sea towards the Ord of Caithness. 
The extension of the power of the Vacomagi across the 
Tay, as far as Buchanty on the Almond, together with 
that of the Vernicomes into Fife, was possibly of 
recent date ; in any case it only meant that the 
Goidels and the Picto-Brythons had come under the 
power of the more purely non-Celtic tribes beyond 
them, and not that they had been displaced by them, 
at least to any considerable extent ; for the later 
history of the Pictish kingdom compels us to regard 
the central region, especially that exposed to Highland 
raids on the lower banks of the Tay, as always 
occupied by the most Goidelic race in the North. 
Among the strategic points of prime importance 
which the Vacomagi would seem to have won from 
the latter, may be mentioned Dunkeld, rightly 
termed the gate of the Highlands. The eccle- 
siastical history of Dunkeld began comparatively 
late, but the fact by no means proves that it had 
not been considered a point of great importance 
from the earliest times. If could hardly, however, 
have got its present name if it had not once been 
in the possession of the Caledon'ans, since in its 
Gaelic form of Diincelden or Diinchallann it means the 
town or stronghold of the Caledones or Caledonians : 
a similar remark applies to the well-known mountain 
called Schiehallion (Sith-Chaillinni). 

^ For the hint as to Schiehallion we are indebted to a letter 
contributed some years ago to the columns of "The 



1 66 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

This circumstance marking the impossibility of 
drawing an intelligible boundary between the Cale- 
donians and the Vacomagi, and our deriving the latter 
vocable from Ptolemy alone, incline us to conclude 
that the Vacomagi were after all only Caledonians 
under another name, or at any rate a grouping of those 
of their tribes that occupied the portion of the Cale- 
donian territory lying nearest to the lowland country. 
Hence we have ventured to treat the Caledonii and 
Vacomagi as forming a sort of twin people of Dicaly- 
dones : see page 94 above. 

The Caledonians occupied the leading position in 
the league against Agricola, but by the year 201 we 
find them occupying the second place, when the Maeatae 
take the lead in threatening hostilities against the 
Roman province, with the Caledonians preparing to 
assist them, contrary to promises the latter had made 
to keep the peace. When the governor of the pro- 
vince, in consequence of failing to get the necessary 
reinforcements from the Continent, was obliged to buy 
peace from the intrepid northerners at a great price, it 
was with the Mseatse he seems to have had to negotiate. 
This clearly suggests that the Mseatse were then the 
leading power, and that they had ready access to the 
frontier of the province. The original strength of the 
independent aborigines no doubt lay in the country 
of the Mseatae, of the Vernicomes and Tsexali, and 
the part of the land of the Vacomagi consisting of the 
district near the Moray Firth, which is still remarkable 

Northern Chronicle" by Mr Macbain on the question 
"Who were the Picts ? " 



THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 167 

as being one of the most fertile regions of Scotland. So 

we see several reasons why Severus, wlien he arrived in 

208, bent on crushing the northern enemies of Rome, 

does not appear to have stayed his march until he had 

made his way through the Vernicomes and Tsexali to 

the shoies of the Moray Firth, and why he then seems 

to have thought it necessary to return through the 

Vacomagi's territory and take possession of some of 

the Mseatae's land.^ And when Constantius Chlorus 

marched beyond the Northern Wall, he is described 

by a Roman panegyrist as reaching the forests and 

swamps of the Caledonians and the other Picts ; for, 

though he may not have penetrated beyond the land 

of the Verturiones, these words were probably in a 

manner warranted by the Verturiones being then more 

or less a mixture of Picts and Celts. Ammianus 

however, writing of the irruption of the northern 

populations in 364, says that they were at that time 

divided into two peoples, the Verturiones and the 

Dicalydones." To the remark already made (p. 94) on 

the latter name, it should be added that it is as old at 

least as the time of Ptolemy, who used it, in an older 

form, as the basis of the adjective which he applies to 

the ocean on the west of Scotland, when he terms it 

Aovr]Ka\r]^6yiaQ, or, as it might perhaps be transcribed, 

Dwicalidonios. Ta return to the Verturian Picto- 

Celts, it would seem that their country had not so 

completely fallen under the power of the non-Celtic 

races as that of the more or less Goidelic population 

^ See Skene's " Celtic Scoland," i. p. 87, &c. 
^ Amm. Marcel!., xxvii. 8. 



1 68 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

of the central part of Cismonlane Pictland ; but the 
northerners had sufficient command of the country 
immediately beyond the Forth to have ready 
access to the Roman province. Some of thtir hordes 
came down from the direction of Dunkeld with 
many Caledonians among them, anxious to join in 
their plundering expeditions ; some came from the 
Mearns and from the land beyond the Mounth, and 
all met among the Verturian tribes, who willingly 
joined them, no doubt, and then steered them clear 
of the end of the Roman Wall, the Latin name of 
which they taught them for the first time. And 
Gildas, though probably possessed of no close ac- 
quaintance with the geography of the northern part 
of the island, cannot be said to have inaptly described 
the Picts as a transmarine people, emerging from their 
coracles to attack the province from the north. i 
This would be about the time when the Romans left 
Britain to its fate : afterwards little or nothing is known 
about the Picts until the time of St. Columba in the 
sixth century, when the peoples of the north appear 
again, occupying the same position, politically speak- 
ing, with regard to one another as before, that is to 
say, the aboriginal race was still dominant. Bede^ 
tells us that they were ruled by a most powerful 
king, called Brude mac Maelchon, who was in the 
ninth year of his reign when Columba came over 
from Ireland, about the year 563. Adamnan, a suc- 
cessor of St. Columba and his biographer, gives us 

1 Mommsen's " Chron. Minora," vol. iii. 14, p. 33. 
^ See Bede, ibid. ii. 4. 



THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 1 69 

to understand that the saint, on finding at Brude's 
court the regulus of the Orkneys, whose hostages were 
in Brude's hands, asked the latter to commend to the 
protection of his vassal certain monks of his community, 
who were then on a voyage in the direction of those 
island^. So much of the extent northwards of Brude's 
dominion, which had its head-quarters at a place some- 
where near the site of Inverness : southwards we know 
that it was too great for the Dalriad Scots of Cantyre 
to contend with, a circumstance which probably had a 
good deal to do from the first with Columba's mission 
to the king of the Picts. There remains Cismontane 
Pictland, from the Forth to the neighbourhood 
of Stonehaven. We are nowhere expressly told that 
this tract was under the government of Brude, but 
there is hardly room for doubt. The whole subse- 
quent history of the Pictish kingdom implies it, and 
especially the fact that Gartnait, who succeeded 
Brude as king, and without a revolution as far as 
we know, fixed his head -quarters at a place on 
the Tay, which is supposed to have been Abernethy, 
whither Columba thought it expedient to follow him. 
Thus we seem to have to do with a kingdom which 
had not as yet one fixed capital, and though the 
southern part was in the long run certain to win the 
preference, the fact, that the head-quarters of the king 
were once in the north, clearly proves that the course 
of conquest had not been from the Tay northwards 
rather than from the Ness towards the sunnier south. 
Further, there is a characteristic of the Pictish kingdom, 
which very clearly points in the direction of the Ness, 



1 70 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

in the neighbourhood of which it always existed, 
and where it was last heard of : we allude to the so- 
called Pictish succession, which was vested in the 
mother, while the father did not count, so to speak. 
Among the results of the working of that custom, as 
observed in the history of the Transmontane Picts, 
may be mentioned the facr, that the sons of the same 
woman succeeded one another, and that, when they 
failed, the sovereignty passed to the sons of a sister ; 
also that no son of a previous king of the Picts is re- 
corded to have ever been made king by them ; that 
his race on the father's side did not matter, there being 
among the kings whose names are preserved a Welsh- 
man and an Angle. Such a law can hardly be regarded 
as the result of any other than a low view of 
matrimony, which must have at one time prevailed 
among them, and of a backward state of society, in 
which a man's paternity was normally uncertain ; in 
fact, it would appear to have been the natural growth 
of some such system of group marriage as that 
so often mentioned by ancient authors, in various 
startling terms, as existing in Britain^ In touching 
on this custom, we have already hinted that in all 
probability it can hardly have been Celtic, but that 
it is rather to be attributed to the descendants of the 
aborigines of the island. With regatd to the Pictish 
succession this may be asserted with still more confi- 
dence : it may even be doubted that it was at 
any time Aryan, while it is certain that outside the 
Pictish range there is in the Celtic world scarcely a 
trace of it known to the history either of Brythons or 



THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. I71 

Goidels. So strange did it appear to the Irish, 
that a legend had been invented by them to account 
for it some time before Bede wrote his History, 
in which he speaks to the effect, that the Picts, 
having come in a few ships from Scythia without 
women, succeeded in persuading the Goidels to give 
them wives, on the condition that the Pictish succes- 
sion should, in case of doubt, be vested in the mother 
rather than in the father/ 

From the time of Brude mac Maelchon, who died 
in 584, down to the beginning of the eighth century, 
our knowledge of what passed in the Pictish kingdom 
is very slender and imperfect : in the first place 
we are met by the difficulty which attaches to the 
history of the indefatigable Aedan, the Scot whom 
Columba had made king of his Dalriad people in 
Britain. On the whole it appears that he was bent 
on strengthening the power of the Dalriads by giving 
them the lead of the Celts opposed to the Angles, 
and in the next place by compelling the Picts to make 
concessions to them. This is probably the explana- 
tion of the fact, that he is recorded to have made an 
expedition to the Orkneys in 580 or 581, and also 
of his part in the war of the Miati, when he seems 
to have fought a battle in which he lost more than 
one of his sons and a great number of his men ; it 
was that of Circinn, of uncertain site, in 596. This 
was, it may be guessed, a struggle on the part of 
the Dalriad Scots, together, possibly, with the Brythons 

^ Bede, ib. i, i, delicately qualifies the story and says : at ubi 
res ueniret in diibmm. 



172 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

of Fortrenn, against the domination of the non- 
Celtic Picts, it may have offered Aedan and 
his men an opportunity of dealing a blow at the 
power of the latter. He may, however, have been 
at the same time following up personal claims of 
his own, of which nothing is known, except that his 
war with the Miati or Mseatse looks hke the first 
of the series of attempts which eventually made his 
descendants masters of the kingdom of the Picts. He 
died in 606, and peace seems to have prevailed for a 
long time afterwards between the Picts and the 
Dalriad Scots, of the former of whom we have nothing 
of importance to say till we come to the great victory 
of the Northumbrian Oswiu in 665. It is not im- 
probable that they had joined the Celtic hosts who 
acted with Penda ; so when he was defeated and slain, 
we find Oswiu, shortly afterwards, making himself 
master of the greater part of the Picts, as Bede states, 
meaning probably the inhabitants of Cismontane 
Pictland. In 672 the latter were aided in an attempt 
to throw off the Anglian yoke by a large force from 
the Picts north of them, but they did not succeed. 
The Picts then had for king a prince named Brude, 
son of Bile, who was on his father's side a Welshman 
from Alclyde, and we hear of him operating in the 
extreme north, where there would seem to have been 
a partial revolt : he besieged a stronghold in Caithness 
in 680, and devastated the Orkneys in 682. His 
activity had, however, not been confined to the north, 
as he laid siege to Dunnottar, in the Mearns, in 681, 
where he was probably engaged against the Angles ; 



THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 173 

then we read of him meeting with success in Fortrenn 
in 683, when he appears termed in Irish chronicles 
king of Fortrenn. At length Ecgfrith, who found the 
Picts assisted by the Dalriad Scots, and probably sus- 
pected that they derived aid from Ireland, sent 
an army thither, which cruelly ravaged the Irish coast 
from Dublin to Drogheda in 684, and in the following 
year he led his forces in person to the country of the 
Cismontane Picts. The result was the battle of Diln 
Nechtain, supposed to be Dunnichen in Forfarshire, 
where he was slain with nearly all his men : with this 
victory of Brude ended Anglian rule beyond the Forth. 
Brude lived till the year 693, and the next Pictish 
king of any note was Nechtan, who began to reign in 
706, and forced the ecclesiastical affairs of his kingdom 
into great prominence. We left Columba among the 
Cismontane Picts, at the headquarters of Gartnait, by 
whom he is said to have been so effectually supported 
as to silence all opposition among the tribes on the 
banks of the Tay.^ What the nature of that opposition 
may have been we are not told ; probably it arose no 
more from those who were still pagans than from men 
who mixed paganism with Christianity. In so far as 
the Goidelic and Goidelicizing people of that region 
were Christians at all, their religious ideas had been 
derived from the teaching of such previous mission- 
aries as Nynias or Ninnian, who laboured also among 
the Picts of Galloway as early as the year 397. 

^ " He subdued to benediction the mouths of the fierce ones 
who dwelt with Tay's high king " : see Stokes's rendering of the 
Eulogy of St. Columba, Rev. Celt. xx. 401. 



174 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

Even when Columba was busy among the Picts 
on the Tay his contemporary and friend, Kentigern, 
appears to have gone on a mission beyond the 
Mount h ; and that Welsh missionaries had carried 
on work of a lasting nature among the Trans- 
montane Picts is proved by a group of dedications 
in the upper valley of the Dee, among which are 
found Kentigern's own name and that of Ffinan, 
whose church in Anglesey is called Llanffinan, while 
his church in Scotland gave its nam.e to Lum- 
phanan, a place of some note in Pictish history. 
Columba's successors continued that saint's work, and 
by the eighth century they had doubtless gained great 
influence in the kingdom ; but it was a Scottic church 
under the rule of the abbots of lona, and it probably 
succeeded to a considerably less degree among the 
Brythons of Fortrenn than in other parts of Cismon- 
tane Pictland, that is, among the Goidelic population's. 
Of the latter, those who were most devoted to it were 
probably the people near the Tay, where the founder 
himself had laboured under royal protection. The 
Columban Church had also done a great work in 
Northumbria, but it had come to an end there in 664, 
when the Angles conformed to Rome. The same 
thing now threatened it in Pictland under Nechtan.^ 
He was at peace with the Angles of Northumbria, and, 
with their example before his eyes, he ordered the 

' As to this name it is to be remarked that it was in Welsh 
Neithon, written Naiton by Bede ; for it is characteristic of the 
mixture of races we have here to deal with, that the names ot 
their kings are handed down to us sometimes in a Goidelic forni, 
and sometimes in a Brythonic one. 



THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 1 75 

observance of Easter and the tonsure of the clergy to 
be regulated by the then practice of the Church of 
Rome. This took place in the year 710 at Scone, 
which is supposed by that time to have become the 
capital and the place of the coronation stone now at 
Westminster. The king had the assistance of Anglian 
priests to carry out the change, and the Columban 
clergy refusing to obey were expelled in 717, when 
they crossed Drumalban to the country of their Scottic 
kinsmen. It is highly probable, however, that ihey 
had many powerful friends among Nechtan's subjects 
who sympathized with them and began to oppose him. 
At any rate we find the king himself becoming a cleric 
in 724, possibly not altogether from choice, as he is 
found to have been succeeded by a king called Drust, 
who was supported by a party opposed to Nechtan. 
Both Nechtan and Drust were, we think, non-Celtic 
Picts ; but the former seems to have derived his 
principal support from the country beyond the 
mountains, where the expulsion of the Columban 
clergy was perhaps less keenly felt, while the latter 
appears more identified with the Cismontane Picts of 
Angus and Mearn. The quarrel between the Picts 
is noteworthy as the prelude to the fall of the power 
of the aboriginal race in Cismontane Pictland, and 
the signal for the two Celtic peoples to compete for 
the succession. 

The leading events in point were, briefly speaking, 
the following •} — In 725, Nechtan's adherents took a 

' In this chapter we have in the main followed Mr. Skene in 
his "Celtic Scotland," vol. i., chaps. 6, y, and part of the suc- 
ceeding one. 



176 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

son of DrQst prisoner, which was avenged by Drust's 
putting Nechtan in chains in the year following. 
Then came a revolution and drove Drust from his 
throne, which was seized by a king called Alpin, in 
Welsh, Elphin. On his father's side he was a great- 
grandson of Domnall Brecc, the grandson of Aedan, 
king of the Dalriad Scots of Argyle : his name, 
which is possibly not Celtic, suggests that his mother 
was of the royal family of the Picts. At the same time 
that he ousted Drust, his brother Eochaid secured the 
throne of the Dalriad Scots for himself; but in Cis- 
montane Pictland Nechtan again emerged into secular 
life to win back his throne, and the complication was 
aggravated by the appearance of another competitor 
for power in the person of Aengus or Angus, son of 
Fergus, or, as he was called by his Brythonic subjects, 
among the Men of Fortrenn, Ungust son of Wurgust. 
He was undoubtedly a Brython, while Alpin may be 
surmised to have identified himself with the more 
purely Goidelic peoples of the central part of Cis- 
montane Pictland, and to have possessed whatever 
claims to power over them, if any, Aedan, the Dalriad 
Scot, had long before him. The first encounter 
happened in 728, between Ungust and Alpin, at 
a place not far from the meeting of the Earn and 
the Tay, where Ungust won the day and possession 
of the whole district west of the latter river. Alpin 
and his Goidels were afterwards totally defeated 
by Nechtan at Scone, when the latter found himself 
again king; but in 729 a battle took place between 
the hosts of Ungust and Nechtan, when the latter 



THE PtCT§ AND THE SCOTS. 177 

suffered so great a defeat that Ungust then became 
king of the Picts. The place where this happened, 
being on the banks of a loch formed by the 
waters of the Spey, indicates that Nechtan relied 
on the men of that district as his most faithful 
subjects. 

The next event was a battle between Ungust and 
Drast, in which Ungust was again victorious, and 
Drust killed. Then Ungust's son, Brude, defeated 
Talargan, son of Congus, one of the leaders of Alpin's 
party, and forced him to flee to the Scots in Argyle. 
But Dungal, king of the Dalriad Scots, happening to 
find Brude in a church on Tory Island, near the coast 
of Donegal, violated his sanctuary and made him 
prisoner, which drew on the Scots an invasion by 
Ungust, who put Talargan to death, and forced Dungal 
to flee, wounded, to Ireland. Two years later, in 
736, Ungust devastated the whole country of the 
Scots, destroyed their capital, together with other 
places, and made several of their princes prisoners. 
Such were the straits to which the Scots were brought 
that Alpin, who had fought against Ungust and 
Nechtan in Pictland, was forced to lead the portion of 
the nation of the Scots of which he was the head, 
into the land of the Picts of Manaw, with a view 
probably of drawing Ungust away from Dalriada. 
But he was met by Talargan, brother to Ungust, 
at the head of the Men of Fortrenn and there 
defeated with a heavy loss to his forces, at a place 
near the Avon. It is not very clear what the 
exact object may have been of the course adopted 

N 



178 CELtiC BRITAIN. 

by Alpiri and his Scots in bursting into Matiaw J 
it has been supposed that Ungust, as king 
of the Picts beyond the Forth, had stirred the 
Picts of Manaw and Galloway to revolt against the 
Angles of Northumbria, whose king, Eadberht, is 
mentioned as engaged in war with the Picts in 740, 
when the king of Mercia took advantage of his absence 
to lay waste a part of his kingdom. It may be that 
the Scots had been encouraged by the Northumbrians 
to invade Manaw by a promise of co-operating with 
them. After his defeat, Alpin was king of the Scots 
for four years, which brings us to 740, when, after 
leading his men into Galloway and completely 
devastating it, he there met with his death in the 
neighbourhood of Loch Ryan in 741. Ungust then 
completed the crushing of the Scottic kingdom, and 
the country thenceforth formed a dependency of the 
Picts. The part of the Scots now seems to have 
devolved on the Cumbrians of Strathclyde, a fact which 
appears to require as its explanation that we should 
suppose them to have previously arrayed themselves 
on the side of the Scots against the Picts and the 
Angles, who were now at one with the Picts. It may 
be that the Cumbrians had also received among them 
the remains of the army of the Dalriad Scots when 
they were finally dispersed, and that they found 
directed against them the power of Talargan^ Ungust's 
brother, on the southern coast of the Firth of Forth. 
At any rate, we read of a battle in 744 between the 
Picts of Galloway and the Cumbrians ; and the latter 
suffered from Ungust and Eadberht a combined 



THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 179 

attack which led, in 750, to the annexation to 
Galloway of a part of their territory and to a battle 
between the Cumbrians and the Picts of Manaw under 
the same leader who defeated Alpin, namely, Talargan, 
who seems to have been the king of those Picts. 
The Cumbrians had the best of it, and Talargan was 
killed; but in 756 the armies of Ungust and of the 
Angles made for Alclyde, and the Cumbrians had to 
submit to the yoke of the Angles. In the meantime 
those who had supported Nechtan seem to have been 
gathering strength in the north, and Ungust had to 
contend with a king, called Brude mac Maelchon, a 
namesake of Columba's contemporary, whose rightful 
representative, according to the Pictish law of succes- 
sion, he may be supposed to have been, at the same 
time that he was probably the heir to Nechtan's 
claims. He also was unsuccessful, and fell in a 
battle against Ungust, in the Mearns, in 752. The 
death of the latter is not recorded as taking place till 
the year 761, after a reign of about thirty years, in the 
course of which he had allowed the monastery of 
Cennrigmonaid or Kilrymont— that is to say, St. 
Andrew's— to be founded : the death of its first abbot 
is recorded under the year 747. 

Ungust was succeeded by his brother Brude, king 
of Fortrenn, who died in the year 763. Then came 
Cinaeth, the son of Wredech, who had in 768 to give 
battle in Fortrenn to Aed Finn or the White : neither 
of them appears from his name to have been a Brython. 
Most likely Aed was a Dalriad Scot reviving the claims 
of Alpin, and trying to rebuild the kingdom of the 

N 2 



l80 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

Scots in Argyle : he seems to have failed, and 
Cinaeth reigned over the Picts until his death in 775. 
He was followed by Alpin, who was probably his 
brother: the latter died in 780, and during his reign 
Aed Finn also died in the year 778. At the death of 
Alpin, Talargan, a son of Ungust, ascended the 
throne ; but this was in violation of the law of Pictish 
succession, which was probably foreign to the habits 
of the Brythons, to whom he belonged. So we find 
besides him another king, whose name was Drust, 
and whose strength presumably lay among the Trans- 
montane Picts that clung to the female succession. 
He survived Talargan, who was slain in 782, and is 
described by one chronicler as king of the Picts 
this side of the Mounth. Drust, who probably 
reigned beyond it among the other Picts, was un- 
doubtedly not a Brython, and was succeeded by a 
man who seems to have been a Goidel — Conall, son 
of Tadg, who was attacked in 789, or the year after, 
by the Brythonic king of Fortrenn, whose name was 
Constantine, son of Ungust. Constantine, succeeding, 
became king of the Picts, while Conall fled to Argyle, 
where he tried to establish himself; but in 807 Con- 
stantine asserted his sway over that region ; and here 
it may be added that the hopes of restoring the 
Scottic kingdom of the Dalriads in Canty re or 
Argyle had been fast vanishing : Fergus, the brother 
of Aed Finn, had died in 78:, while three years 
later, in 784, the bones of the founders, the Sons of 
Ere, were carried away from lona to be buried with 
those of the kings of Ulster at Taillten, in Meath. 



THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. l8l 

Now the Scandinavian pagans made their ap- 
pearance on the coasts of the British Isles in 793, 
which was followed by such terrible devastation, that 
the Columban community of lona, which was 
supreme over the Columban churches, both in 
Britain and Ireland, betook itself partly to Kells, in 
Meath, and partly to Dunkeld, on the Tay, where 
Constantine built a church for them. He died in 
820, and was succeeded by his brother Ungast, who 
had ruled under him for some years over the province 
consisting of the old kingdom of the Dalriad Scots 
of Argyle. He died in 834, and was succeeded, in 
violation of the Pictish rule, by ihe son of a previous 
king, namely, Drust, son of Constantine : so we find 
another king reigning at the same time with him, 
supported perhaps by the Transmontane Picts, as 
was usual with them in such cases : his name was 
Talargan, son of Wthol. They reigned three years, 
but a competitor arose in the person of Alpin, a re- 
presentative probably of the previous Alpin, and cham- 
pion of the claims of the same house. He was 
victorious in a battle in 834, but before the end of 
the year he was defeated and slain : tradition 
localizes the contest in the Carse of Gowrie and Fife. 
After Drust and Talargan came Uven or Owen, son 
of Ungust, who had ruled for thirteen years over the 
Scuts of Argyle. As he was the son of a previous 
king, he probably reigned only over the Cismontane 
Picts : this lasted only for three years, from 836 to 
839 ; for now there came over the affairs of Pictland 
a great change, which w^s qshered in by the Danes, 



152 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

who had been engaged in plundering Leinster and 
parts of Ulster. They crossed to the north of 
Britain, and succeeded in giving the Men of Fortrenn 
battle, in which the latter suffered a crushing defeat. 
The man who reaped the advantages of this expedi- 
tion and probably the one who had planned it, was the 
son of Alpin, the Scot defeated and slain in 834 : his 
name was Cinaeth or Kenneth, and he is usually 
known as Kenneth mac Alpin. He followed up the 
defeat of the Men of Fortrenn with such success that 
he soon became master of the Dalriad province in 
Argyle, where probably there were still many of his 
Scottic kinsmen, and after a few years' struggle he 
made himself king of the Picts. His first year is 
reckoned to have been 844; and he died in 860, 
leaving his family firmly established in possession of 
the kingdom. 

One may say, that for more than one hundred 
years, beginning with the victory of Ungust in 728, 
no Goidel before Kenneth had been able to possess 
himself for any great length of time of the kingdom 
of Scone, as that of the Picts is sometimes called ; so 
his reign may be said to have commenced a new 
era, that of the supremacy, not so much of the Scots 
as of the Goidels generally, over the Brythonic 
populations and the aboriginal peoples of the country. 
The changes which accompanied this revolution were 
important — Kenneth completed, among other things, 
the reinstating of the Columban clergy. It had been 
begun by Constantine when he gave Dunkeld to the 
family of lona, but now a church was built there for 



THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 1 83 

the relics of the founder, St. Columba ; and the abbot 
of Dunkeld was placed at the head of the Northern 
Church. The first of that description, styled bishop 
of Fortrenn and abbot of Dunkeld, is recorded as 
dying in the year 865. All this had, no doubt, been 
well earned by the Columban clergy, as they may be 
supposed to have been active supporters of the cause 
of Kenneth's family from the time of the earlier Alpin 
to Kenneth's triumph. Lastly, it may be mentioned, 
that, whereas the kings of Fortrenn, who were also 
over-kings of the Picts, had usually been on good 
terms with the Angles of Northumbria from the 
time Ungust made peace with Eadberht, Kenneth 
is described as repeatedly invading Saxony, which 
means the territory of the Angles, where he burned 
Dunbar and Melrose. As to his other wars, we read 
of the Brythons, probably the Cumbrians of Strath- 
clyde, destroying Dunblane, and of the Danes 
devastating Pictland as far as Dunkeld. Before 
leaving this reign it may be added that writers of 
a subsequent period term Kenneth the first king of 
Scots who reigned over Pictland, and his father Alpin 
is likewise called by them king of Scots. Historians 
have set themselves the task of discovering whence 
the said Scots came, and have guessed that there was 
a general rising everywhere of the remains of the 
Dalriad Scots in favour of Kenneth. It must be 
readily granted that he was on the father's side a 
Dalriad Scot entitled to be king of the Scots in the 
narrower sense of the word, and that some of them 
were probably to be found both, in their old territory 



1 84 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

and elsewhere, who may have readily joined him. But 
surely the Scots sought for were always in the heart 
of Pictland on the banks of the Tay, the warmest 
adherents of the Columban Church, and the lineal 
descendants of the men who had undergone defeat 
with the earlier Alpin in 728. "We hear of Kenneth 
and Alpin's Scots mostly because writers who used 
the Latin language called them Scotti. By this time 
the proper rendering of that word, however, is Gaels 
or Goidels, and the chronicles not written in Latin 
call them such, as does also the Pictish chronicle, 
though written in Latin, when it speaks of Goedeli 
instead of Scotti^ in mentioning the succession 
established by them in the person of Kenneth's 
brother.^ The accession of this family means, in a 
word, the supremacy of the Picto-Goidels over the 
other nations of Pictland, the Verturian Brythons, and 
the non-Celtic Picts, the former of whom now began 
rapidly to disappear, as a people, from history. It is 
right, however, to say that besides a certain Goidelic 
nucleus in the Tay valley and the Goidelic element 
among the ancient Dumnonii there was probably very 
little that could be racially described as Goidelic at all 
in North Britain : so the word Goidel comes largely 
to mean here one who spoke Goidelic and accepted 
the customs of the Goidel, for instance, in the matter 
of the Celtic succession as distinguished from the 
succession usual among the Northern Picts. 

Kenneth was succeeded, not by his son, but by his 

1 Skene's " Chronicles of the Picts and Scots,'* p. 8. 



THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 1 85 

brother Domnall or Donald, in accordance with the 
Celtic rule of succession known to history as 
tanistry, whereby Kenneth's son came in only after his 
father's brother. The establishment of this custom is 
spoken of in the Pictish chronicle as first effected in 
the time of Donald, and it is referred to in the passage 
already mentioned, as the Rights and Laws of the 
Kingdom of Aed, in allusion to the Dalriad Scot of 
that name who died in 778, after trying to set up the 
old kingdom of the Scots of Argyle. Donald's reign 
was a short one, as we find Constantine, son of 
Kenneth, beginning to reign in 863. Passing by 
quarrels with the Cumbrians, and struggles with the 
Norsemen, we find Constantine defeated by the Danes 
in a great battle in which he fell in the year 876, 
together with a great many of those who were most 
loyal to his house. He was succeeded by his brother 
Aed who died in 878, killed, it is said, by his own 
people, a statement which introduces a contest for the 
throne, in which the Brythonic element won again for 
a time a kind of victory. This took place in the 
person of Eochaid, son of Rhun, King of Alclyde, for 
the mother of Eochaid — his name is not recorded in 
its Brythonic form — was sister to Constantine and 
daughter to Kenneth. With him was associate d 
as his tutor and governor, a man whose name was 
Girg : it is given also as Girc, Grig, Girig, and Ciric. 
Whether the latter ever filled the office of king tradition 
does not clearly state, but it is noteworthy that it con- 
nects him with the district of the Mearns, while 
Eochaid was probably supported by the Brythons of 



1 86 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

Fortrenn. Bernicia appears to have been now over- 
run by the Picts and the monastery of Lindisfarne 
plundered. Girg is said to have reannexed to 
the kingdom of Strathclyde the Cumbrian district 
south of the Solway, and also to have liberated the 
Picts of Galloway from the yoke of the Angles ; but 
none of these things are authenticated, though they 
may well have taken place at this time, as North- 
umbria, after Eadbeiht ceased to reign in 758, and 
his son and successor shortly fell at the hands of his 
own people, passed out of the power of Ida's family 
into confusion, which was afterwards grievously 
deepened by the Danes. As to the Pictish kingdom 
we seem to have now to do with a coalition against the 
dynasty of Kenneth mac Alpin ; and the real relation in 
which Girg probably stood to Eochaid was that of a 
non-Celtic king of Pictish descent, wielding the power 
of the Pictish nation, with Eochaid ruling among the 
Brythons of Fortrenn more or less subject to him. 
Lastly, these two kings of Pictland are represented as 
trying to strengthen their position by conciliating the 
Scottish Church, which they freed from the various 
exactions and srrvices to which it had till then been 
liable. Even this, however, did not avail them 
against the Scottic, or, more accurately speaking, 
the Goidelic party, and they were expelled in 889, 
when Donald, son of Constantine, became king, and 
the succession was firmly re-established in the male 
line of Kenneth mac Alpin. Kenneth and his suc- 
cessors had hitherto been called kings of the Picts, 
while the country over which they ruled was the 



THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 187 

kingdom of Scone, or else the land of the Picts, for 
which Pictania and Pictinia were invented by the 
chroniclers ; but in Donald's time, or not long later, 
this seems to have begun to get out of fashion ; and 
we find one chronicle^ in recording his death, which 
took place in the year 900, calling him king of Alban. 
The next king was Constantine, son of Aed, who 
was brother to Donald's father. He reigned forty years, 
during which he tried to consolidate his kingdom by 
putting the different churches on a footing of equality 
as to their privileges and rights, at the same time 
that an end was made of the supremacy of Dunkeld, 
while the bishop of Kilrymont or St. Andrew's came 
to be called the bishop of Alban. Now at length 
Constantine's subjects began to get some rest from 
the Norsemen and the Danes ; but they were destined 
ere long to have to fight with the king of England : 
as soon as ^thelstan, who began to reign in 925 
found himself firmly established on his throne, he set 
about annexing Northumbria to his other provinces, 
and in 926 got possession of Deira, whence he 
expelled the Danish prince who had the upper hand 
there. The latter sought the alliance of Constantine : 
^thelstan anticipated this by invading Alban by 
land and sea in the year 933, when his troops are 
said to have made their way as far north as Dun- 
nottar in the Mearns and another place called Wer- 
termor, by which was probably meant the plain of 
Fortrenn. Thus they would seem to have ravaged 

^ See the Annals of Inisfallen, in Skene's " Chr. of the Picts 
and Scots," p. 169, 



1 88 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

two of the most important provinces of Alban : 
three years later Constantine and his men, together 
with the Cumbrians and the Danes from different 
parts of Britain and Ireland, met in the north of 
England at a place called Brunnanburh, and fought a 
great battle with ^^Cthelstan in 937, when they were 
utterly defeated by the English. ^th.elstan died 
in 940, leaving his throne to his son Edmund, and 
Constantine was succeeded in 942 by Maelcoluim or 
Malcolm, son of Donald. He began his reign by 
trying to assert his power over the peoples beyond 
the river Spey, where considerable portions of the 
country had long been subject to the Norsemen But 
a more important event was yet to come ; North- 
umbria had for some time been in the power of 
Danish princes who were kings of Dublin, and 
in the habit of deriving assistance from their kins- 
men in Ireland. They had access to Northumbria 
through the country of the Cumbrians, who seem to 
have been only too willing to help them against the 
Angles, as were also probably the Picts of Galloway. 
So Edmund harried Cumbria in 945, and gave it 
together with Galloway to Malcolm, on the under- 
standing that he, who was connected by marriage 
with Anlaf Cuaran, the most irrepressible of the 
Danish Wickings who troubled the country at this 
time, should give assistance to the English by land 
and sea against the Danes. In 946 Edmund was 
succeeded by Edred, who proceeded to reduce 
Northumbria under his power ; and, after various 
contests in that kingdom, we read of it accepting 



THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. I89 

Edred's rule in 954 : he then made it an earldom. 
As to its extent towards the north, the Pictish 
Chronicle tells us, that, in the reign of Indulph over 
Alban, from 954 to 962, the English gave Edinburgh 
up to him, so that he now ruled as far south on the 
eastern side of the island as the Lothian river Esk. 
But, instead of there being one earldom of Northum- 
bria, Bernicia was made soon after 966 into an earldom 
and Deira into another. Then Kenneth, son of Mal- 
colm, who was king of Alban from 971 to 995, among 
the first things he did, invaded the more northern earl- 
dom as far as the confines of Deira : this he repeated the 
year after, carrying the earl away as his prisoner ; and 
it has been asserted that Edgar, the king of England, 
gave a great part of Bernicia to the king of Alban as 
a fief of his crown. But there is no proof, and the 
only fact which is tolerably clear is, that those 
northern kings who were in the habit of invading it, 
must have believed that they had some sort of here- 
ditary right to it, the grounds of which are no longer 
known. In the year 1000 xEthelred, king of England, 
ravaged the country of the Cumbrians, but did not 
succeed in wresting them from the king of Alban ; and 
we find them giving valuable aid to Malcolm, son of 
Kenneth, who reigned from 1005 to 1034, and con- 
tinued his family's practice of invading Bernicia. 
This he did first in 1006, when he laid siege to 
Durham, and suffered a serious defeat. But now a 
great event occurred in the year 10 14, to wit the battle 
of Clontarf, near Dublin, where the Danes of Ireland, 
and their aUies from Britain and the smaller islands, 



190 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

met with a crushing defeat. Their power was con- 
siderably reduced in consequence not only in Ireland 
but in Britain also ; and Malcolm was at length able 
to extend his sway towards the north and north-west 
of Scotland. In 1018 he succeeded, with the aid 
of the Cumbrians, in bringing to the field such a 
force for the invasion of Bernicia, that he gave battle 
to the Northumbrians at Carham, near the Tweed, 
and defeated them so completely that all the land of 
the Angles north of that river was ceded to him, and 
it became for the first time the boundary between 
England and the northern kingdom. For this pro- 
vince he is said to have done homage in 1031 to 
Cnut, the king of England. Malcolm died in 1034; 
and he was the last male descendant of Kenneth mac 
Alpin. 

The kingdom then devolved on Donnchad or Dun- 
can, the son of a daughter of Malcolm. He was an 
unfortunate prince, whose troubles began with an 
attempt by the earl of Bernicia to recover the dis- 
trict ceded by his predecessor to Duncan's grand- 
father, and by his invading Cumbria in the year 
1038, which induced Duncan to lead a large army 
to lay siege to Durham, where he met with a dis- 
astrous defeat. He was still more unlucky beyond 
the Forth, where, however, next to nothing is 
known of his history. Since writers such as Simeon 
of Durham altogether ignore him as king of Alban, it 
may be doubted whether he ever possessed much real 
power there ; he died, probably, in the attempt to 
acquire it, being slain in the year 1040 by Macbeth, 



THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. tQl 

the head of the Trans montane Picts, who bore the 
title of mormaer or grand steward of Moray. As 
the latter is said to have been Duncan's general, it 
would seem that Duncan had tried to conciliate him, 
and to attach to himself one who was practically inde- 
pendent of him. The circumstances under which 
Macbeth slew Duncan are unknown; but, as it 
appears to have happened at a place near Elgin, it 
may be regarded as the result of an attempt on 
Duncan's part to reduce him to submission : the re- 
sult was that Macbeth mounted the throne of Alban 
and occupied it for no less than 1 7 years. For a long 
time the Norsemen had been in possession, not only 
of the Orkneys and Shetlands, but also of the north 
and west of the mainland : the most powerful of them 
at this time was one Thorfinn, who was on his 
mother's side, Hke Duncan, a grandson of Malcolm, 
from whom he had received the title of earl when 
he was very young. One of the first things 
Macbeth did was to try to force Thorfinn to pay 
tribute to him as king; and an old Norse story 
called the Jarla Saga,i which makes no allusion to 
Duncan, but speaks of Macbeth as Karl Hundason, 
or Karl Hound's Son, gives an account of the war 
which ensued. Not only did Macbeth's repeated 
attempts to conquer Thorfinn completely fail, but 

1 A critical edition of this and the other Orkney Sagas, pre- 
pared by Dr. Vigfusson for the Master of the Rolls, has been in 
type since 1875, but it is not yefpublished : thanks to the kind- 
ness of a friend, the author had the use of the Norse text some 
years ago. 



IQ^ CELTIC BRITAlK. 

the latter carried the war into Moray, nor did hg 
cease before he had cruelly ravaged the country 
as far as Fife, when Macbeth may be supposed to 
have been obliged to come to terms with him. The 
sagas magnify Thorfinn's power, and speak of his 
possessing no less than nine earldoms in Scotland ; 
but the details they give tend to show that he had 
nothing much to do afterwards with Macbeth's king- 
dom, at least untiLthe latter wanted his aid, and that 
he settled down to the ordinary life of a Wicking, 
spending his winters in the Orkneys, and his summers in 
harrying the western coasts of England, together with 
Wales and Ireland. Not only did Thorfinn con- 
tinue at peace with Macbeth, but he was induced 
by the latter to give him very valuable aid in resisting 
the attack which the party of Malcolm, son of 
Duncan, was preparing ; the result was a great 
battle in 1054, but it fell short of dislodging Macbeth, 
who seems to have had the united support of the 
people of Alban, and it was only in 1057 that 
Malcolm, after having been in possession for some 
time of the country south of the Forth, was able to 
drive him over the Mounth and to slay him in battle 
at Lumphanan in Marr, or the district between the 
Dee and the Don. At Macbeth's death, the prince 
who should be mormaer of Moray was set up as his 
successor, but he was killed after a few months by 
Malcolm at Es?y in Strathbolgy, on the north-west 
boundary of the present county of Aberdeen. 

Macbeth was not of the family of Kenneth mac 
Alpin, but his wife was ; for she belonged to a branch 



THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 1 93 

of it, the head of which Duncan's grandfather had 
thought expedient to kill, lest he might some 
day stand in the grandson's way to the throne : 
that Macbeth made the best of his wife's pedigree 
appears probable from the fact that, in a grant ^ of 
land by him and his wife to the Church, they are 
respectively entitled king and queen of Scots. But 
the descent of Macbeth's wife, and the lack of all 
historical proofs that he was a worse tyrant than 
the other princes of his time, do not suffice to re- 
move the difficulty which historians have found in 
understanding how an usurper was allowed to seat 
himself so readily and so firmly on Duncan's throne. 
This is, however, a difficulty which is in a great 
measure of their own creating, as Macbeth was 
not a mere usurper ; he himself probably considered 
that he inherited the right of Brude mac Maelchon 
and of Nechtan to the throne, a right which was 
even of older date than that of Kenneth mac Alpin. 
In the interval of nearly 200 years, from the begin- 
ning of Kenneth's reign to the death of Duncan, 
it is not improbable that the two CeHic races in 
Cismontane Alban had been rapidly amalgamating 
together : in fact, we read but little about the men 
of Fortrenn causing trouble to the kings of Alban 
after their great defeat by the Danes and Kenneth's 
accession ; and it is remarkable that the crozier of 
St. Columba, which served the Goidels as their 

1 *' Registr. Prior. S. Andree,"p. 114, Skene's " Celtic Scot.," 
i. p. 406, and Reeves's "Culdees," pp. 125, 126. Compare 
Herbert in the "Irish Nennius/' pp. Ixxviii.-xc. 

O 



194 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

Standard, is recorded to have been borne before 
the men of Kortrenn in a battle in which they prayed 
for his aid against the Danes in Sirathearn and van- 
quished them. This was in the year 904, in the 
reign of that Constantine who undertook to put 
the churches of different origins on a footing of 
equality within his kingdom. By the time of Mac- 
beth, the Goidels and Brythons of Alban might, 
perhaps, practically be treated all alike as Goidels. 
But not so the non-Celtic tribes ; for, though the 
Transmontane Picts had been able to rule down to 
the Forth, the Celtic kings on the banks of the Tay 
were scarcely ever able to exercise much power be- 
yond the mountain barriers, and, though the Goidelic 
language may have been steadily gaining ground 
among the nearest non-Celtic tribes, the process of 
amalgamating the two races must have been a com- 
paratively slow and tedious one. This is fully borne 
out by what we read ; for every now and then we 
find the men of the Mearns acting as it were in 
the vanguard of the Transmontane Picts against the 
Drinces of the Kenneth dynasty who quartered them- 
selves amongst them. Thus it was the former, pro- 
bably, that put forward Girg in 878 and supported 
him ; then Donald, son of Constantine, fell at Dun- 
nottar in their country, in the year 900, though we are 
not expressly told that they killed him ; but Malcolm, 
son of Donald, is distinctly stated in the Pictish 
Chronicle to have been slain by the men of the 
Mearns at Fetteresso, in their country, in 954. They 
had also probably sc mething to do with the death of 



The picts and the Scots. 195 

Kenneth, son of Malcolm, which took place at Fetter- 
cairn, in the Mearns, in 995, through the treachery 
we are told, of Finnola, daughter of Cunchar, earl of 
the province of Angus : she is made to appear as 
the avenger of her only son, killed by Kenneth at 
Dunsinnan in the range of the Sidlaw Hills. Nor 
is it improbable that the men of the Mearns and 
the other Picts took a leading part in the wars 
of succession, of which we have glimpses in the 
year 997, when Constantine, son of Culen, was 
killed after he had reigned only three years ; and 
in 1004, when another king of Alban, Kenneth, son 
of Dub, was slain. The chief of one branch of the 
Kenneth dynasty seems to have usually quartered 
himself in Fortrenn, while the other is repeatedly 
identified with the Mearns, which he most likely tried 
to treat as Fortrenn had been treated ; but here the 
resistance was prolonged, probably owing to the aid 
the inhabitants derived from the Picts in their back- 
ground. In what light the dominant race regarded both 
Fortrenn and the Mearns may be seen from certain 
Irish legends calling them its sword-lands,^ a term 
applied also in the Pictish Chronicle to the Mearns. 
At length we hear no more of the men of the 
latter district, but the antagonism probably continued 
between the people of Cismontane Alban and those 
beyond the Mounth : it was no doubt a much more 
languid antagonism, as the authority of the kings 
reigning over the former was seldom able to make 

1 See Skene's " Chr. of the Picts and Scots," pp. 10, 319, 

329- 

2 



196 CELTIC BRITAIN-. '^ 

itself appear much more than a name in the noith, 
which may have required of the most powerful of 
the northern Picts that he should content himself 
with the title of mormaer or grand steward. 
Several of Macbeth's immediate predecessors seem 
to have gone further, and to have claimed to be 
independent of the king reigning in Cismontane 
Alban : thus Finlaig, who was killed in 1020, is called 
by one chronicler king of Alban •} while another,^ 
who died in 1029, is called so by another chronicler. 
Moreover, when Cnut received the homage of Malcolm, 
he obtained that also of the Wicking at the head of a 
petty kingdom in Argyle, and of a prince, whose 
name is given in the Saxon Chronicle as Mselbsethe 
or Mealbaeade, which has been mended by some 
into Macbeth. If, however, it is to be altered, it is 
only into Maelbeth, a real name of the same class as 
the former, and borne probably by a predecessor 
of Macbeth's. Whichever of the two he was, he 
appears to have regarded himself, and to have been 
regarded by the king of England, as independent of 
Malcolm ; and his dominions may be supposed to 
have taken in all Transmontane Alban except a 
part of Argyle, and a portion of the north which 
was, together with the Orkneys, doubtless in the 
power of the Norsemen at that time. So, apart from the 
relations in which Macbeth personally stood to Duncan, 
and of which we know next to nothing, his becoming 
king in his stead was not so much an act of usurpation 

^ See the Annals of Ul-ter and Tgernach lespccti^^ely in 
Skene's " Chr. of the Picts and Scots," pp. 368, 377. 



THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 197 

as a forcible assertion for a time, and that not a very 
short one either, of the supremacy of his people over 
those of Cismontane Alban. Of course the death of 
Macbeth and his unfortunate successor, Lulach, did 
rot put an end to the aspirations of the northern 
Picts. For a time, it is true, we hear little of them, 
but in the reign of king David, Angus, the son of 
Lulach's daughter — a succession not correctly Pictish 
—having become mormaer of Moray, made a for- 
midable attempt to secure the throne of Scotland; 
but it ended in his defeat and death in the year 
1 130. Still later in the reign of David's grandson, 
Malcolm, we read of severe measures being taken ia 
1 1 60 to reduce to quietness the people of Moray, 
and of grants of their lands being made by the king 
to the barons by whom he surrounded himself. 

The amalgamation already indicated of the Celtic 
peoples of Alban during the period of nearly two 
centuries from the accession of Kenneth mac Alpin 
to that of Macbeth must have added lo the im- 
portance of the Goidehc element in the kingdom ; so 
its heads now began to have in Latin the title of 
king of Scotia and of rex Scot forum, that is to say, 
king of Goidels, though it is rendered oftener by 
the ambiguous phrase "king of Scots." This, 
it need hardly be said, had Httle to do with the 
connexion of Kenneth and his ancestors with the 
Dalriad Scots, as it seems to have become the fashion 
only in the tenth century, and was followed in the 
ensuing one, by Macbeth among others. But at the 
same time that the name Goidel extended itself to all 



198 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

peoples speaking Celtic in Cismontane Alban and the 
province of Dalriada in Argyle, the term Cruthni, 
or Picts may be supposed to have gained in de- 
finiteness of meaning by becoming more closely 
ideritified with the Transmontane Picts, who probably 
had the most ri^ht to it from the first. To what 
extent Goidels had interm'xed with these descendants 
of the neolithic inhabitants of Britain it is impossible 
to say ; nor is one as yet able to trace in Scotch 
topography the retreat, step by step, of their 
language, as it remains an unknown tongue. 
We find, however, that in Columba's time there 
were men of rank on the mainland opposite the 
island of Skye, with whom he could not converse in 
Goidelic, as there were also peasants of the same 
description in the neighbourhood of king Brude's 
head-quarters near the river Ness, while there is no 
hint that the saint found any linguistic difficulty in 
making his way at that monarch's court. So it would 
seem that Goidelic was already asserting itself in that 
district, and that it was not very long ere it had made 
much progress in the region east of the Ness, though 
the aboriginal language may be supposed not to 
have died out of the country for some time after 
the Danes and the Norsemen began to plunder these 
islands. That the Goidelic idiom vigorously spread 
itself in all directions under the Kenneth dynasty 
might be expected from the nature of the case ; and 
as against the Brythonic dialects this is amply borne 
out by the topography of Scotland. A few instances, 
some of which will bring us south of the Forth, will 



THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. T99 

suffice to show the kind of evidence they affi^rd. 

Verturiones was probably the traditional form of 

a Brythonic word, but the later one of Fortrenn 

is Goidelic, and we do not even know what the 

later Brythonic form may have exactly been, though 

we seem to have traces of it in the Werter-morum 

already cited from the pen of Simeon of Durham. i 

Next may be mentioned the name of Kentigern, 

which would be pronounced by his kinsmen in his 

time Cunotigernios, or the like, in the first part of 

which the Goidels discerned the word for hound and 

called the saint In Glas Chii or The Grey Hound -? 

though he was a Bry thon, and though the place where he 

settled finally was in the land of the Cumbrians, it is 

now known only by his Goidelic name of Glas Chu 

as Glasgow. Lastly may be mentioned the name of 

the river Nith, called in Ptolemy's Geography Novios^ 

which, if Celtic, was the word for new in all the 

dialects ; but the Brythons treated it as Novios or 

Noviios, and eventually made it into the Welsh 

nezvydd, new ; and it is from some stage of this last 

that we geiNith; but it could only happen through 

the medium of the men who spoke Goidelic. In this 

instance they were probably the Picts of Galloway, but 

the same thing appears to have occurred north of the 

Forth in the name of a stream flowing into Largo Bay 

in Fifeshire, called Newburn, but which is said to have 

been formerly known as Nithbren.^ 

1 See the " Mon. Hist. Brit.," p. 686, C, and note /•. 
^ Pinkerton's " Vitte Sanctorum Scotise," pp. 195- 
3 See Skene's ** Celtic Scotland," i. p. 133, 



200 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

So much for the triumph of the GoideUc ele- 
ment in the North : a word must now be said of its 
ultimate defeat and retreat to the Highlands. After 
the crown came again into the possession of Kenneth 
mac Alpin's descendants at Macbeth's death, it 
remained with them until the direct line became 
extinct by the death of the Maid of Norway in 1290, 
when it proved the bone of contention between the 
king of England and the Norman barons connected 
in the female line with the house of Kenneth — 
we have said Norman barons, for the dynasty had 
long since become English, and surrounded itself 
with a host of Normans, Angles, and Flemings. 
Ihis may be said to have begun when Malcolm 
married Margaret, sister of Edgar yEtheling, the son 
and heir of the Englibh king Edmund, after he had 
been obliged to flee with his mother and sisters to 
Scotland in 1068. The southern influence went on in- 
creasing until the court in the time of David, who began 
to reign in 1124 after being educated in England in all 
the ways of the Noimans, was filled with his Anglian 
and Norman vassals. He is accordingly regarded as the 
first wholly feudal king of Scotland, and the growth 
of feudalism continued at the expense of the power and 
position of the Celtic princes, who saw themselves 
snubbed and crowded out to make room for the 
king's baroLs, who had grants made to them of land 
here and there wherever it was worth having. 
The result was a deep-seated discontent, which every 
now and then burst into a flame of open revolt on 
the part of the rightful owners of the sqil^ and it 



THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 201 

smouldered long afterwards as the well-known hatred 
of the clans of the Highlands for the farmers of the 
Lowlands, of the Gael, as Sir Walter Scott puts it, 
for the stranger and the Saxon, who was regarded as 
having reft the native of the land which was his birth- 
right. It was doubtless the force that finally welded 
Celts and non-Celts together into one people, known 
to us in modern times as the Gaels of the Highlands 
and Islands of Scotland. As to the language, we 
read that when Margaret, in 1074, called a council 
to inquire into the abuses which had crept into the 
Church, Gaelic was the only language the clergy 
could speak, so that King Malcolm, her husband, 
acted as her interpreter. But the predominance of 
the Celtic element seems to have passed a^^•ay with 
the reign of Donald Ban, who, though brother to 
Malcolm, allowed the Scots, when they made him 
king in 1093, to drive out all the English whom his 
brother had introduced ; but after some intervals of 
power he was defeated in 1097 by Malcolm and 
Margaret's son Edgar, under whom, together with 
his brothers, the English element was much more 
than reinstated, as every encouragement was held 
forth by them and their feudal successors to English- 
men, Flemings, and Normans to seule in Scotland. 
At the time, however, of the War of Independence, 
Gaelic appears to have still reached down to Stirling 
and Perth, to the Ochil and Sidlaw Hills, while north- 
east of the Tay it had as yet yielded to English or 
Broad Scotch only a very narrow strip along the coast. 
One of th^ lessons of this chapter is that ibe 



202 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

Goidel, where he owned a fairly fertile country, as in 
the neighbourhood of the Tay, showed that he was 
not wanting in genius for political organization ; and 
the history of the kingdom of Scotland, as modelled 
by Kenneth mac Alpin and his descendants, warns 
us not to give ear to the spirit of race-weighing 
and race-damning criticism that jauntily discovers, in 
what it fancies the character of a nation, the reasons 
why that nation has not achieved results never fairly 
placed within its reach by the accidents either of 
geography or history. Considering, also, how little 
the general tenor of recent study has taught one 
to expect from the non- Aryan races of Europe, it is 
worth while recalling the testimony which history 
bears to the political capacity of the aboriginal in- 
habitants of Britain, in that part of it where they 
were able to hold their own ; for the kingdom which 
Kenneth mac Alpin wrested from the Brythons of 
Fortrenn was, so far as can be gathered, neither 
Celtic nor Aryan in its origin. The trouble the 
non-Celtic Picts were able to give the Romans and 
the Romanizing Brythons has often been dilated 
upon by historians, who have seldom dwelt on the 
much more remarkable fact, that a power, with its 
head-quarters in the neighbourhood of the Ness, had 
been so organised as to make itself obeyed from the 
Orkneys to the Mull of Cantyre, and from Skye to 
the mouth of the Tay, as early as the middle of the 
sixth century. It is important to bear this in mind 
in connexion with the question, how far the earher 
Celtic invaders of this country may have mixed with 



THE T'lCTS AND THE SCOTS. 203 

the ancient inhabitants, since it clearly shows that 
there was no such a gulf between them as would 
make it impossible or even difficult for them to 
amalgamate. It is but natural to suppose that 
the Goidelic race has been greatly modified in its 
character by its absorption of this ancient people of 
the Atlantic seaboard. 



2 04 CELTIC BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE ETHNOLOGY OF EARLY BRITAIN. 

The most ancient name now supposed to have been 
given to these islands was that of Cassiterides, and to 
Britain that of Albion. The latter occurs in a treatise 
respecting the world, which used to be ascribed to 
Aristotle : it is fow regarded as the work of some- 
body who lived later. We then meet with it after a 
long interval in the Natural B istory written by Pliny, 
who died in the year 79 : he only remarks that 
Albion was the name given this country when all the 
islands of our group were called Britannise ; but it 
continued to be the habit of Greek writers, even long 
after his time, to treat Britain simply as one of a 
number of islands, to all of which they applied the 
adjective Bretannic, or, according to their more accu- 
rate spelling, Pretanic, After Britain had been divided 
and sub-divided, by the Romans, they not unfrequently 
spoke of the province in the plural as Britannise, but 
Phny could not have hid that in his mind : most 
likely he was thinking of the UptraviKai Nz/o-ot of Greek 
authors. There is, however, another allusion to Britain 
which seems to carry us much farther back, though it 
has usually been ill understood. It occurs in the story 
of the labours of Hercules, who, after securing the cows 
of Geryon, comes from Spain to Liguria, where he is 
attacked by two giants, whom he kills before making 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF EARLY BRITAIN. 205 

his way to Italy. Now, according to Pomponius Mela, 
the names of the giants were Albiona and Bergyon, 
which one may, without much hesitation, restore to 
the forms of Albion and Iberion, representing, un- 
doubtedly, Britain and Ireland, the position of which 
in the sea is most appropriately symbolized by the 
story making them sons of Neptune or the sea-god. 
The geographical difficulty of bringing Albion and 
Liguria together is completely disposed of by the fact 
that Britain and Ireland were once thought by Greek 
and Latin writers to have been separated from Spain 
and Gaul by only a very narrow channel ; not to 
mention that it is hardly known how far Liguria may 
have reached towards the west and north, or even 
whether the Loire — in Latin, Liger— may not have 
g3t that name as a Ligurian river : it is described 
by Vibius Sequester as dividing the Celts from the 
Aquitanians.i In some other allusions to this story 
nothing is found that can be made out to refer 
to Ireland, and in one of them the second giant is 
called Ligys, who doubtless represented the Ligurian 
race. In some form or other the story can be traced 
as far back as the time of the Greek tragedian, 
^schylus,^ in the sixth century before the Christian 
era, though it is impossible to say when the names of 
the giants who attacked Hercules were introduced, or 
when they assumed the forms which may be guessed 
from the manuscripts of Mela. Even in the time of 
Pliny, Albion, as the name of the island, had fallen out 

1 See Elton's " Origins of English History," p. 25. 

Mt is met with ia a fragment of the " P ometheus Unbound." 



2o6 Celtic Britain. 

of use in the case of Latin authors ; but it wsls not so 
with the Greeks, or with the Celts themselves, at any 
rate those of the Goidelic branch ; for it is pro- 
bably right to suppose that we have but the same 
word in the Irish and Scotch Gaelic A/da, genitive 
Alban, the kingdom of Alban or Scotland beyond the 
Forth. Albion would be a form of the name accord- 
ing to the Brythonic pronunciation of it, and between 
the latter and Alban thereis precisely the same difference 
of vowel as one finds between the genitive of the Latin 
word oratio, prayer, namely orationis, and the orthan 
which the Irish made of it when they borrowed 
it into their own language. It would thus appear 
that the name Albion is one that has been restricted 
to a corner of the island, to the whole of which it 
once applied. If so, we ought to be able to 
indicate an intermediate point in this retreat, and we 
can : in a work associated with Cormac, a learned 
Irishman of the ninth century, the name Alban is 
found given to a part of Britain which extended to 
the Ictian Sea or the English Channel •} nor does 
the author of it appear to have been the only Irish 
writer ^ who has spoken of Alban as reaching so far. 
Cormac goes on to specify that within his Alban were 

1 " Cor mac's Glossary," published in English by Stokes (Cal- 
cutta, 1868), sv. Mug-eime, p. iii. 

^ See the MS. of Duald Mac Firbis, quoted by Reeves in 
his Adamnan's Life of St. Columba, p. 145. Add to these 
instances a passage to which Dr. Stokes has called roy attention 
in the Book of l.einster, fo. 29a, line 43, where the peoples of 
Alha are described as Saxons, Welshmen, and Picts : see 
also the verse of the Duan Albaiiach quoted in "The Welsh 
People," p. 115. 



THE ETHNOLOGY OB' EARLY BRITAIN. 2C7 

situated the town of Glastonbury and an unidenti- 
fied fort of the Cornish Brythons. Thus it would 
seem that at the time he referred to, approximately 
the end of the Roman occupation, the name Alban 
meant all those portions of the west and north of 
Britain which his kinsmen, the Goidels of this island, 
had been wont to call their own. The name has 
not been identified for certain in the dialects of the 
Brythons, and it is probable that they were not the 
race that gave it to the island; it is more likely that 
they only learnt it from the Goidels whom they found 
in possession. It need hardly be added that its 
meaning is utterly unknown, in spite of guesses both 
new and old : possibly the word is not Celtic. 

Next comes the question whence the name Britain 
is derived. This, together with the Medieval Welsh 
Brytaen, is to be traced back to the Latin form, 
which was most commonly written Britannia : and 
this in its turn appears to have been suggested to the 
Romans hy Britan?2i: the Greeks adopted it but slowly 
and sparingly. When they did use it the spelling was 
ordinarily that of Boerravm. On the other hand, the 
Welsh is Yitys Prydain, "the Island of Prydain," 
which is not to be regarded as etymologically con- 
nected with it, but rather as a variant of Prydyn, 
which will be brought under the reader's notice by 
and by. Its people were known to the Romans as 
Britanni, and this term it was that suggested the 
word Britannia to denote their country, which would 
seem to have come into existence not long befi^re 
the time of Julius C?esar, when Britain first began 



208 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

seriously to occupy the heads and arms of the 
Romans ; at any rate, Csesar was one of the first 
authors to make regular use of the term, though it 
occurs once in the writings of Diodorus Siculus, who 
lived in his time and that of Augustus, spending 
much of his life at Rome ; but he wrote in Greek, and 
in this matter he followed as a rule the custom of 
his countrymen, while we find Cicero, as well as his 
brother, who accompanied Caesar to Britain, using 
the word Britannia so freely as to suggest that they 
knew of no other name for it. As we^ have thus 
traced Britain to the Latin Britannia^ and the 
latter to the Latin name of the people, it will be 
asked what about that name itself? Its oldest form, 
as used by the Romans, was Britannia which they 
regarded as belonging to the set Britannus, Britanna^ 
Britannuin^ to which might be added Britannicus^ 
and the like. Here the practical identity between 
the Lgtin and Greek forms makes it probable that 
it was from or through the Greeks of Marseilles that 
the Romans first heard of these islands. This is not 
all, for the Latin Brittanni and especially the Greek 
Bperror^/, have their exact counterpart in the Medieval 
Irish plurals Bretain, genitive Bretan, which had at times 
to function as the name both of the Brythons and of 
the island. It is to be noticed that neither Bperrajo/ 
or Britanni, nor the Irish Bretain has anything corre- 
sponding to it in the dialects of the Brythons them- 
selves. From whom, then, did the Greeks hear the 
word which served as the basis of their names for 
Britain and its people ? It cannot have been from 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF EARLY BRITAIN. 209 

the Brythonic peoples of the south-east of the island, 
or any, perhaps, of the Gauls of the Continent : it 
was probably from the natives of the south-west who 
brought their tin 10 nnarket, and in whose country the 
only Celtic speech in use was as yet Goidelic. But, 
while the earliest allusions of the ancients to Britain 
take us back near the time of Pytheas, there is no 
distinct evidence of any direct communication existing 
then, or for a long time afterwards, between Dumnonia 
and the Continent. This brings us to the conclu- 
sion already stated, that the people of the south-west 
conveyed their tin eastwards to some point on the 
coast, to be there sold to foreign merchants ; the 
latter were probably, in the main, Greek traders from 
Marseilles. When, however, the Romans came to 
Britain they learnt the name which the Bryihons gave 
themselves in the south-east of the island, and this 
was not Britanni or Brettani, but Brittones, singular 
Britto. It is the name which all the Celts who have 
spoken a Brythonic language in later times own in 
common ; among the Kymry it becomes Brython, 
which is one of the names they still give themselves, 
and from which they derive the word Brythoneg, 
one of their names for the Welsh language. This, 
in old Cornish, was Brethonec, and meant the 
Brythonic dialect of Wales and Cornwall after 
Goidelic had been chased away, while in Breton the 
word assumes the form Brezonek, and means the Bry- 
thonic language spoken in Lesser Britain. So, when 
one wants to speak collectively of this linguistic group 
of Celts from the Clyde to the neighbourhood of the 

p 



2IO CELTIC BRITAIN. 

Loire, confusion is best avoided by calling them by- 
some such name as Brythons and Brythonic, leaving 
the words Britain, British, and Britannic for other uses, 
including among ihem the exigencies of the English- 
man, who, in his more playful moods, condescends to 
call himself a Briton. The traditional Latin spelling 
of the earlier name seems to have been incontestably 
Britannia while both the Brythonic and the Goidelic 
forms, also the French Bretagne, prove beyond doubt 
that it was etymologically entitled to the // allowed to 
the other form Brittones, though some editors are 
pleased to treat this as Britones, for which there seems 
to be no special reasons but their own perversity : Bi'it- 
tones occurs often enough as the spelling in ancient 
manuscripts, and usually in inscriptions. The word 
is first used in Roman literature by Juvenal and 
Martial ; but the more the Romans became familiar 
with Britain and its leading Celtic peoples the more 
ttie form Bvittones may be said to have gained on 
that of Britanni, and it seems to have reacted on 
the spelling of the latter and the kindred word 
Britannia, which began to be not unfrequently written 
with // in the time of Commodus. This continued 
on the coins of that emperor and his successors 
until the victory over Britain ceased to be com- 
memorated by such means in the time of Carausius, 
whose coins in consequence give us no information on 
this point. A rare medallion^ of Commodus goes so 

^ There is one, we believe, in the British Museum, and Sir 
John Evans possesses another, which he kindly allowed the 
author to inspect some years ago. 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF EARLY BRITAIN. 211 

far as to give us the theoretically correct spelling 
Brittama, with the consonants as given by Greek 
writers ; but the change of spelling is probably not 
to be ascribed to their example so much as to the 
analogy of the synonymous Brittones or Brettones. 
From the writings of such men as Bede, Nennius, 
and the chroniclers, the form Britanni may be said to 
have been driven out by that of Brittones or Brettones : 
of the two the latter alone can have been regarded 
by them as a living word, the other, Britannia having 
passed away with the Roman occupation and the 
Roman empire. 

So much as to the spelling and the history of these 
words, but what did they originally mean ? The 
usual way to explain them is to suppose them of 
the same origin as the Welsh brith^ spotted parti- 
coloured, feminine braith and to find in them a refer- 
ence to the painting or tattooing of the body already 
alluded to more than once. Any one, however, who 
knows the elements of Celtic phonology will at once 
see that hrith, and braith^ which are represented in Old 
Irish by mrecht or brecht^ can have nothing to do with 
Brythoti or the related forms. So far as we know, the 
only Celtic words which can be of the same origin 
with them are the Welsh vocables brethyn^ cloth, and 
its congeners. In a manuscript of the ninth century 
we meet with the simpler Welsh form brith,^ which 
would now be written bryth, and as it there enters 

* See the Welsh glosses published by Stokes in the " Transac- 
tions of the Philological Society for 1860-1861," p, 210, and in 
Kvihn's ** Beitrsege," iv, p. 393. 

P 2 



212 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

into the plural compound mapbrith, and occurs as a 
gloss on the Latin word cunabula, meaning a baby's 
swaddling clothes, the singular implied must have 
been either brath or breth The connexion may be 
seen still more clearly on Irish ground, where bratt 
or brat means a cloth, a cloak, or a sail, and brattdn, 
a little cloak, while from the former a derivative 
bretnais was formed, which in Cormac's time, had 
two distinct meanings : when the root-word was 
taken simply as relating to cloth or clothing, bretnais 
meant a thing connected with clothing — namely, a 
brooch ;^ but when it referred to the national name of 
the Brythons it meant a thing connected with them — 
namely, their language,^ which in the case Cormac 
was speaking of, happened to be the Brythonic 
tongue of the people of Cornwall in his time. It would, 
then, appear that the word Brython and its congeners 
meant a clothed or cloth-clad people. But a national 
name of such a nature would have little meaning 
unless they had hved some time or other near another 
people that wore little or no clothing, or else clothing 
of a very different material and make. If the first 
people called Brittones could be regarded as the first 
Celtic invaders of Britain, the name might be regarded 
as meant to distinguish them from the neolithic 
natives whom they found in possession, and whose 
clothing may have consisted of the skins of the 
animals they killed ; but as no Goidels, in the Hn- 

i It may, however, be that bretnais in this sense is a com- 
pound, meaning a dress fastening or the like. 

^ Stokes's " Cormac," s. v. " Mug-eime," p. HI. 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF EARLY BRITAIN. 213 

guistic sense of the word, are found to have been 
called Brittones either by themselves or by the other 
Celts within historical times, there is no reason why 
the name should not be treated as exclusively belong- 
ing in Britain to the non-Goidelic branch of the Celts 
of the second invasion. Who, then, were the people 
whom the Brythonsdidnot consider cloth-clad or pro- 
perly clothed ? They could hardly have been Celts of 
any kind, as the art of making cloth of some sort was 
known on the Continent, even to the earliest of them 
to land here. In fact, the words we have cited supply 
the proof, and it would have been worth our while, had 
space allowed of it, to show how original Aryan gv or 
giv, a partly labial combination, yields the simple labial 
b in the Celtic languages ; how it is simplified, with the 
guttural hardened to cor ky in the Teutonic ones, which 
allows us to equate Irish bo with English cozv, and to 
regard the old Welsh brith alluded to and the Irish bratt 
as etymologically one and the same vocable with their 
familiar English equivalent cloth, the German kleid, 
cloth, a garment, and the old Norse klsedi, of much 
the same meaning ; and how the last-mentioned lan- 
guage possessed in a genitive plural klaedna the same 
kind of derivative as the Welsh brethyn. One might 
then widen the circle of comparison and introduce 
the old Irish word breit, a strip of any woollen cloth, 
a kerchief, which implies, according to the ascer- 
tained course of phonetic decay in Goidelic speech, 
an older form, brenti : both the latter and bratt 
have their equivalents in the Sanskrit group of 
words connected with the verb grath or granth^ 



214 Celtic Britain. 

to tie or to wind up, which, as it falls decidedly 
short of the more dei^eloped idea of weaving, strikingly 
suggests that the Aryan nations of the West did not 
simply retain a civilisation which some would trace to 
the far East, but that they were in some respects in 
advance of it. So among the useful arts practised by 
Celts and Teutons long before any of them had 
reached the shores of the Atlantic was that of 
weaving, however rude it may have been. In other 
words, the race with which the Brythons contrasted 
themselves to their own satisfaction, when they began 
to give themselves that name, was probably some 
of the aboriginal tribes whose home they invaded on the 
Continent ; for there are reasons to think that the 
name belonged to the Brythons before they came to 
this country. That is to say, remnants of that people 
are supposed to show traces of their existence in 
Gaul in historical times. Thus Pliny speaks of Con- 
tinental Britanni who seem to have lived on the banks 
of the river Somme, and it is thought that most or all 
of the regiments termed Brittones in the Roman 
army in Britain were natives of Gaul.i Procopius 
also, a Greek writer of the sixth century, gives a 
very fabulous account of an island called Brittia, 
which he distinguishes from Britannia. One writer 
on this difficult subject, M. de Vit, identifies Brittia 
with Jutland, and supposes Brittones from beyond 
the Rhine to have shared in the advance of the Teu- 

1 See Pliny"s Hist. Nat. iv. io6, also "Das Romische Heer," 
by Hiibncr in " Hermes," xvi ; and M. de Vit s communication 
in the " Bullett. dell' Inst, d Corrisp. Arch." (Rome), for 1867, 
P- 39- 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF EARLY BRITAIN. 215 

tons on Gaul, and to have settled in Brittany. That 
is doubtful, but it is a fact, though never noticed, 
that Brittia must have been a real name, as it is 
exactly the form which would result in that which is 
the actual Breton name of Brittany— namely, Breiz : 
this last is the shortest, and cannot be derived 
from any known form of the kindred name of 
our country or of its people, and thus tells not a 
little against the tradition that Brittany was first 
colonized by Br} thons from here ; not to mention the 
fact that there is some difficulty as to whence those 
fugitives could have come, seeing that if they set out 
from the nearest parts of this country, that is, from 
Cornwall or Devon, they would most likely have been 
Goidels, so that the language of the Bretons would 
now probably be a Goidelic dialect, and not the 
comparatively pure Brythonic speech it is. This view 
would give Breton an importance not usually attached 
to it. 

The soundest division which can be made of the 
Celtic family rests on an accident of Celtic phonology. 
It is that of the change of qu or qv into /, which is 
found to have taken place in some of the Celtic 
languages, but not in all, at the same time that 
it is known in languages other than Celtic. Thus, 
while Latin retained the older complex in the words 
quinque^ five, and equus, a horse, the Greeks differed 
among themselves, some saying TtffjLTre for five, and 
some iriyre, some 'iTtTTUQ for a horse, and some 
Ikkoq : while the Romans said quatuor, four, and 
quum or quo??i when, some of the other Italians said 



2l6 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

petur and pon. The Celts differed in much the 
same way, since all the Brythons, whether Welshmen 
or Bretons, agree in using / (liable to be softened 
into (^), as did the Gauls also, as far back as we can 
trace them, in all their names excepting a few like 
Seq'iani and Sequana ; the Goidels, on the other 
hand, whether in Ireland, Man, or Scotland, never 
made qv into /, but simplified it in another way 
by dropping the v^ and making q into c (liable to 
be modified into the guttural spirant ch) : this took 
place in the sixth or the seventh century. In the old 
Ogam inscriptions of Ireland the qv is represented by a 
symbol of its own, and not only there, but in those of 
Wales, Cornwall, and Devon. Thus on both sides of St. 
George's Channel the most important key-word which 
the ancient epitaphs supply us with is maqvi^ the 
genitive of the word which has yielded the Goidels of 
the present day their mac, a son, and has taken in 
Welsh the form ab (for an older map) of the same 
meaning. The inscriptions in question from Wales 
and Dumnonia may, roughly speaking, be assigned 
to the sixth century, though some of them may be of 
the fifth and some of the seventh : the remarkable 
point about them is that the little Celtic which they 
yield us usually agrees both in the matter of the qv 
and in other respects, with the language of the Goidels 
rather than with Gaulish, Welsh, Old Cornish, or 
Breton. Who, then, were the Celts, of whose language 
the epitaphs in question give us a few samples? 
The question has been \ariously answered : some 
would say that they were invaders from Ireland, the 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF EARLY BRITAIN. 217 

Scots, in fact, who made descents on the coast of 
Britain about the end of the Roman occupation and 
afterwards ; but the evidence to that effect is not yet 
abundant, while the fact that the Romans had not 
even a single company of soldiers to defend either 
Wales or Cornwall is significant. Some would say 
that they were the ancestors of the Welsh and of the 
Celts of Cornwall and Devon, and that their language 
was an early form of what has since become known as 
Welsh and Cornish : that is to say, the Celtic of the 
Ogam inscripti ns in the course of time underwent 
changes which shaped it into the dialects we call Welsh 
and Old Cornish. Years ago this was the view taken 
by the author, but a more thorough understanding of 
the inscriptions, together with additional information, 
has forced him to give it up in favour of the following, 
namely, that the Celts who spoke the language of the 
Celtic epitaphs were, in part, the ancestors of the Welsh 
and Cornish peoples, and that their descendants have 
changed their language from Goidelic to Brjthonic. 
In oiher words, they were Goidels belonging to the 
first Celtic invasion of Britain, of whom some passed 
over into Ireland, and made that island also Celiic- 
At that point, or siili earlier, all the British Islands 
may be treated as Goidelic, excepting certain parts 
where the neolithic natives may have been able to 
make a stand against the Goidels ; but at a later period 
there arrived another Celtic people with another 
Celtic language, which was probably to all intents and 
purposes the same as that of the Gauls. These later 
invaders called themselves Brittones and Belgse, and 



2l8 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

seized on the best portions of Britain, driving the 
GoideUc Celts before them to the west and north of 
the island. Now it is partly the monuments of these 
retreating Goidels of Britain that we have in the old 
inscriptions, but partly perhaps those also of Goidelic 
invaders from Ireland. For it is true that their Goidelic 
idioms, which were at length supplanted by the ever- 
encroaching dialects of the Brythons, formed prac- 
tically the same language as that of the Celts of 
Ireland, of Man, and of Scotland. Thus we are left 
without any means of distinguishing in point of speech 
between the ancient inhabitants and their invading 
kinsmen from the sister island. 

We shall now try further to show what portions of 
the island were occupied by the Brythonic and the 
Goidelic Celts respectively, about the beginning, say, 
of the Roman occupation. Setting out from the Isle 
of Wight, we find that the Dumnoni of Devon and 
Cornwall are proved by their epitaphs^ after the Roman 
occupation to have been Goidels, in so far as they were 
Celts at all, for in point of blood they consisted 
largely, perhaps, of the non-Celtic natives, and the 
language of the latter can hardly have died out in the 
district near the Land's End at the time when it got 
its name of Belerion, which Ptolemy gives it ; since it 
is possibly not an accident that Belerion is an early 
form which would yield, in old Irish, i?e/re, later, ^erla. 
This is the word the Irish employ for language, usually 
a language not their own and particularly the English 
tongue. Now whether Belerion meant a tongue in 
^ See Hiibner's " Inscr. Brit. Christ.," Nos, 3, 17, 24, 25, 26. 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF EARLV BRITAIN. 2I9 

the linguistic sense or merely a tongue of land it is evi- 
dence of Goidelic occupation, and it goes back to the 
time of Posidonius and Cicero : see pages 8, 45 above. 
As to the Durotriges, to the east of the mixed 
people of Dumnonia, it is difficult to determine their 
nationality. On the whole, however, they also seem 
to have been Goidels, a conclusion suggested, among 
other things, by the name of their town, Dunion, 
which differs from the Gaulish dunon. Wel&h din, a 
town or fortress, just where it comes near its Irish 
equivalent diin^ genitive dune. In that case no 
part of the country west of the Dorsetshire Stour 
and the Parret is presumably to be regarded as 
Brythonic. North of the Bristol Channel, the 
Severn and its tributary the Teme probably formed 
the boundary, the country within those rivers being 
divided between the Silures, who had the south-east, 
and the Demetse, who had the south-west. Both these 
peoples may, like other Goidelic states, have, to a 
certain extent, absorbed an earlier, non Celiic, neo- 
lithic population ; but as against the Br>thons we must 
treat them in point of language as Goidelic, and leave 
the question of origin mainly to those who study skins 
and skulls. The rest of what is now the Principality of 
Wales, together with the portion of the West of England 
adjoining, is usually supposed to have been occupied 
by the Ordovices ; but this powerful people, which we 
assume to have been Brythonic, overshadowed a 
Goidelic population occupying ihe north-west corner 
of the Principality, including Mona and the mainland 
within the Clwyd, the Dc;e, and the Mawddach, which 



220 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

reaches the sea at Barmouth. At some earlier stage 
in the Brythonic advance it may be gathered that 
the Ordovices owned no land north of the Dee or 
within its bend, and that the old earthworks of Caer 
Drywyn, north of the Dee, and overlooking the small 
town of Corwen, were probably a stronghold of the 
Goidels against the Ordovices of Mid-Wales, who 
formed, as it were, a wedge reaching the sea between 
the Mawddach and the Dovey, and completely sever- 
ing the Goidels of North Wales from those towards the 
Severn sea : their country may, roughly speaking, be 
identified with the Powys of later times, and that name, 
which probably meant merely a settlement, may be 
looked at as a very old one. On the shores of 
Cardigan Bay several points may be indicated which 
successively marked the advance southwards of the 
Ordovices. They seem first to have conquered the 
coast from the Dovey to the Wyre, a small river which 
reaches the sea some miles south of Aberystwyth, 
in Cardiganshire, together with a corresponding ex- 
tent of country inland, all included in the old 
bishopric of Paternus or Padarn, whose name is 
now best known in connexion with his church 
of Llanbadarn Fawr, near the same town. The 
Wyre marks the boundary of a Welsh dialect, peculiar 
to the northern part of Cardiganshire : it has much 
in, common with the dialects of Merionethshire and 
Montgomeryshire, while it differs in certain particulars 
from those of Demeiia. Later, the remainder of what 
is now Cardiganshire was conquered as far as the 
neighbourhood of the Tcivi by Keredig, as mentioned 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF EARLY BRITAIN. 221 

in a previous chapter. This happened in Christian 
times, so that the displacement of the inhabitants 
does not seem lo have been very great, which is in 
a measure proved by the local dialect being in 
most respects the same as that of tlie rest of Demetia. 
David's name figures among the dedications in 
the district as it does more to the south, while 
the tombstone of a man of importance in Keredig's 
kingdom, probably a ruling prince, stands at Pembryn, 
overlooking the sea some distance north of Cardigan : 
his name was Corbalengi, and the inscriber has styled 
him an Ordous^ meaning probably thereby one of the 
Ordovices. 

East of the Ordovices the whole breadth of the 
island was occupied by the Cornavii and Coritani, the 
former of whom possessed a strip of country extend- 
ing from the neighbourhood of the Worcestershire 
Avon, along the eastern bank of the Severn, and 
continued in a sort of an arc of a circle dipping into 
the sea between the Dee and the Mersey : it is 
possibly from the peninsula with which their territory 
began that this people had its name of Cornavii, just 
as the south-west of Britain and the north-west of 
France both terminate in a Cornish district, as did 
also the north of Scotland : compare the Welsh word 
corn^ of the same meaning and origin as the Latin 
cornu^ and the English horn. North of the Mersey 
and the Humber most of the country, as far as the 
Caledonian Forest, belonged to the Brigantes. The 
Parisi in the region of the Humber and the Tees ap- 
pear to have been independent of them, as were also 



22 2 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

probably the Novantae, whose territory may have 
embraced all the country west of the Nith and 
south of the Ayr, as it undoubtedly included the 
promontory of the Novantae, whereby the Mull of 
Galloway is supposed to have be en meant. The nam of 
the Nith in Ptolemy's time was Novios, and possibly it 
is from it that this people got the name of Novantae, 
given them probably by Brythons, in much the same 
way as the Setantii may, perhaps, have been so termed 
from their living near the river Seteia. To the east 
and north-east of the Novantae dwelt the Selgovae, 
protected by thick forests and a difficult country. 
Possibly they have left their name in the modern 
form of Sol way to the moss and to the firth so called 
The word probably meant hunters, and the people to 
whom it applied may be supposed, not only to have 
been no Brythons, but to have been to no very great 
extent Celtic at all, except, perhaps, as to their 
language, which they may have adopted at an early 
date from the Goidelic invaders : in a great measure 
they were most likely a remnant of the aboriginal in- 
habitants, and the same remark may be supposed to be 
equally applicable to the Novantae. It would not be 
surprising, then, to find that they acted together, and, 
on looking into the later history of the Roman 
occupation, we certainly seem to detect them as a 
people who gave the province a great deal of trouble. 
They lived between the Walls, and possibly appeared 
in later history as Atecotti. Everything points 
to the conclusion that these were either the Selgovae 
or the Novantae, or rather the aggregate of them, 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF EARLY BRITAIN. 223 

and not least significant is the fact that the word 
Atecotti appears to have meant old or ancient, 
and marked them out as a people of older standing 
in the country than the Brythons, to whom they 
possibly owed that name. The struggle in which they 
took part against the Romans ended in their ultimately 
retaining only the country behind the Nith, where 
the name of the Novanise becomes, in Bede's mouth, 
that of the Niduarian Picts, known as the Picts of 
Galloway for centuries afterwards. We return to the 
Brigantes, whose name probably denoted a league 
of several peoples, or a dominant people ruling over 
a considerable territory containing a number of 
different tribes, among whom may be mentioned the 
Setantii, in what is now probably Lancashire. The 
Votadini occupied a part of Lothian and the coast 
down to the southern Wall. They must have come 
sooner or later under the power of the Brigantes, as 
it is in this district that the latter bequeathed their 
name to Bernicia : see page 113 above. Whether 
they extended their sway also to the Dumnonii, we 
have no means of ascertaining. These last inhabited 
the country between the Novantae, the Selgovse, and 
the Votadini on the one hand, and the mouth of the 
Clyde and the Forth on the other, together with an 
extensive tract beyond those rivers, including the 
Northern Manaw or Manann, and reaching to the 
Earn — possibly to the Almond — and to the neigh- 
bourhood of Loch Leven in Fifeshire. The 
southern portion of the Dumnonii, inhabiting as they 
did what was later the nucleus of the kingdom of the 



2 24 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

Cumbrians, maybe regarded, like the other Dumnonii, 
as Goidels who adopted Brythonic speech ; but the 
Votadini were of Brythonic race, and are always 
treated as such in Welsh literature, where their name 
becomes Guotodin and Gododin ; they disappeared 
early, their country having been seized in part by the 
Picts from the other side of the Forth, and in part by 
Germanic invaders from beyond the sea. But to 
return to the outlying portion of the Dumnonii, when 
the wall from the Clyde to the Forth was built they 
were cut off from their kinsmen included in the 
Roman province ; and possibly it is they who figure in 
history as Boresti and Verturiones, or at any rate who 
supplied a ruling class in the country of the Verturi- 
ones. They formed the advanced posts of the 
Brythons, and they had given hostages to Agricola, 
and possibly to Severus, not to mention that their 
name of Verturiones may have meant the people of 
the land of the fortresses in allusion, either to stations^ 
occupied by the Romans in their country, or to earlier 
works of their own construction, intended for the 
defence of their borders against other tribes. 

We have already suggested the position of the 
Caledonians, who w^ere Picts. They, together with 
the Vacomagi, flanked the country of the Verturiones 
or Men of Fortrenn, on its northern boundary ; but 
how far both Pictish peoples were influenced by the 
Goidels of the Tay Valley it is hard to say, especially 
as the latter seem to have been there from early times, 
a conclusion forced upon us by the absence of any 
^ See Skene's " Celtic Scotland,'' i. p. 74. 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF EARLY BRITAIN. 225 

certain historical indication, how or when they reached 
the Tay. The position of the Vacomagi has already 
been touched upon ; so has that of the Tsexali, and 
that of the Vernicomes. The remaining peoples of 
the North, all probably non-Celtic in point of race, 
and mostly, perhaps, in that of language, were the 
following, as enumerated by Ptolemy : — The Epidii 
occupied most of the sea-board from where the 
Leven discharges the waters of Loch Lomond into 
the estuary of the Clyde, to the neighbourhood of Ben 
Nevis, and it is to them that the Epidian Promontory 
belonged : by this Ptolemy is supposed to have 
meant the headland now called the Mull of Cantyre. 
Their name looks as though it had been one given 
them by a Brythonic peope, and had meant horsemen, 
though they dwelt in a region where one would have 
rather expected coracles : its Brythonic appear- 
ance is, perhaps, only due to an accident, as we 
seem to have practically the same word in the name 
of the islands called Ebudae, which, together with 
the neighbouring ones, from Tiree to Arran may have 
all belonged to them, though Ptolemy calls only 
one of them Epidion, identified by Dr. Skene ^ 
with the Isle of Lismore : it may have been 
that of Jura. Beyond the Epidii, and inhabiting the 
west a 5 far, presumably, as Cape Wrath, come three 
or four peoples, called by Ptolemy respeciively 
Cerones, Creones, Carnonacae, and Carini. At first 
sight we are tempted to regard he four names as 
merely clerical variants of a single one, but such a 

^ " Celtic Scotland," i. p. 69. 
Q 



2 26 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

view is not countenanced by the still greater variety of 
the modern names, some, at least, of which may be 
supposed connected with some of those recorded by 
Ptolemy : witness those of the lochs — Crinan, Creran, 
Carron, Kearon, Keiarn, and a good many others 
involving the same consonants, and belonging to the 
western Highlands, but better known to the angler 
than the historian. The region from Cape Wrath to 
Duncansby Head may be said to have been the home 
of the Cornavii, so called for a reason which has 
already been suggested as a matter of conjecture. 
The south-eastern side of the present counties of 
Caithness and Sutherland was divided between two 
peoples, called the Smertae and the Lugi. Lastly, the 
coast from the neighbourhood of the Dornoch Firth 
to the confines of the Caledonians, belonged to a 
nation called the Decantse. Most of these tribes of 
the west and north were probably allies or subjects of 
the powerful twin people of the Dicalydones. 

Now that we are dealing with Ptolemy's account of 
the north of the island, we may add a few words re- 
specting the remarkable feature of Scotland known to 
the ancients as the Caledonian Forest. It was called 
in Latin Caledonius Saltus or Silva Caledonia, and 
in Welsh literature Coed Celyddon or the Wood 
of Calidon : Ptolemy, who terms it KaXrjdonoc 
Apv/.i6c, by which there is no occasion to suppose 
him to have meant the chain of mountains called 
Drumalban, says that it was above the land of the 
Caledonians, whence the usual and erroneous idea 
that it must have been in the Western Highlands, in a 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF EARLY BRITAIN. 227 

region where one would hardly, perhaps, have expected 
to find it at all. The mistake has arisen from failing 
to realize Ptolemy's point of view : among other pecu- 
liarities of his description of the geography of Britain, 
he began from what he considered the most northern 
point of the island. And as he somehow made a 
mistake in his map of Scotland, and twisted eastwards 
what should have been north, his most northern point 
of Britain turns out to have been the headland of the 
Novantae : it is thence that he seems to have surveyed, 
as it were, the whole island. Beginning at that 
corner he enumerates the features of the coast until 
he reaches Cape Wrath, and from the same place he 
commences his description of the western coast south- 
wards to Cornwall. Pie follows the same plan in 
enumerating the peoples inhabiting the country, and 
from his point of view the Vacomagi, who, like the 
Caledonian Forest, have sometimes been transported 
to the west because he states them to have been 
above the Caledonians, fall into their right place, 
and into possession of their towns, some of which 
cannot easily be removed very far from the shore of the 
Moray Firth. Similarly interpreted, the Caledonian 
Forest is found to have been located by Ptolemy 
where there is every reason to suppose that it really 
was — namely, covering a tract over which we are told 
that a thick wood of birch and hazel must once have 
stretched, that is, from the west of the district of 
Menteith in the neighbourhood of Loch Lomond across 
the country to Dunkeld.^ It is this vast forest that 
1 Skene's " Celtic Scotland," i. p. 86. 
Q 2 



2 28 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

probably formed in part at least the boundary between 
the Caledonians and the Verturiones or the mixed 
people of Fortrenn, 

We have already made some use of linguistic facts 
in trying to determine the nationality of some of the 
peoples brought under the reader's notice, and now 
we would bring them together in the compass of few 
words. In doing so the place of importance is 
claimed for Celtic proper names which involve the 
consonant /. In the Greek language, for instance, 
this sound comes from two sources : thus in vrarijp 
it corresponds to the / in the Latin pater and the 
Sanskrit pitar, and to / in their English equivalent 
father : in this instance the Greeks had perpetuated the 
original Aryan J?. But in the. Celtic languages it 
is found to have been one of their characteristics 
that they eventually got rid of this Aryan consonant, 
so that the Irish word for father is not pathair^ but 
athair, and the Celtic preposition corresponding to 
the Greek Trapa, appears in Welsh as ar, and is given 
in Old Gaulish as are in the name of the cities 
termed by Csesar AremoriccE} from a Gaulish word 
which is in W^elsh mor^ sea : this latter, with the prefix, 
went to form the adjective applied to the states on or 
by the sea in the north-west of Gaul, but a shorter form 
became usual, yielding Brittany the name of Armorica 
it sometimes bears. Greek, on the other hand, had 
words with a p from another origin, such as -nin e or 
irifXTTe, five, in which that consonant corresponds to 
the ^u of the Latin quinque. Some of the Celtic lan- 
* " Bell. Gall.," v. 53 ; vii. 75 ; viii. 31. 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF EARLY BRITAIN. 229 

guages likewise supply us with a / of this origin, but 
not all of them, the Goidehc dialects having never 
made qv or qu into p. The Welsh word correspond- 
ing to TTf'/jTre and quinque is now pump, and it 
must have been somewhat similar in Gaulish, in which 
the name of the cinquefoil is recorded as pempedula ; 
while in Old Irish, which reduced its early qv into c, 
the fifth numeral was coic. When we have, then, a 
presumably Celtic word containing p, we presume on 
the whole that we are dealing with one of the languages 
of what has been called the Gallo-Bryihonic branch of 
the family, and not of the Goidelic one. Passing by 
such place-names as Prsesidium and Praetorium as 
clearly Latin ; Procolitia, Petrianae, and Spinis as not 
improbably Latin ; and such others as Durolipons as 
possibly in part Latin, we have the following left, 
which appear to come either from a Gallo-Brythonic 
language, or from that of the non-Celtic aborigines of 
the island : — 
(i.) Mons Granpius or Graupius, from which the 
great battle where Agricola defeated Calgacos 
and his Caledonians took its name. It is 
thought to have been on the tongue of land 
at the meeting of the Isla with the Tay. 
(2 ) Corstopiton or Corstopilon, supposed to be 

Corbridge in Northumberland. 
(3.) Epeiacon, the name of which has led to its 
being identified with Ebchester ; it has also 
been placed at Lanchester and Hexham. 
Ptolemy's figure-% however, point rather to 
Keswick in Cumberland, but the name seems 



230 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

to signify a place for horses or cavalry, which 
appears to be the case also with Vereda, a 
station mentioned in the Antonine Itinerary 
and identified with Castle-Steads at Plumpton 
Wall, near Old Penritb, in the same county : 
it may be that the two names denoted one 
and the same town. 

(4.) Maponi, given by the anonymous geographer of 
Ravenna as the name of a place in Britain, 
and meaning probably the Fane of Maponos,^ 
a god equated with Apollo on a fine monu- 
ment at Hexham ; he was also probably the 
Mabon spoken of in the Mabinogion.^ 

(5.) Parisi, the people in the neighbourhood of the 
Humber. 

(6.) Petuaria, the name of the town ascribed to the 
Parisi by Ptolemy, the auxiliaries from which 
are termed Petuerienses in the Table of Dig- 
nities. It may have been at Patrington or 
Hedon. 

(7.) Pennocrucion, which has been identified by 
some with Stretton, by others wiih Penkridge 
in Staffordshire : wherever it was, the name, 
which was a common one, survives in that of 
the latter town. 

(8.) Prasutagos, king of the Eceni, and husband of 
Queen Boudicca. 

(9.) Toliapis, at the mouth of the Thames, and now 

1 The Berlin " Corpus Insc. Lat.," vii. No. 1345. 

2 Oxford Edition, pp. 124, 128-32, 140, 141, 159 ; Guest's 
Edition, ii., pp. 225, 226, 234, 235, 2S6, 287, 300, 301. 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF EARLY BRITAIN. 23 1 

called the Isle of vSheppey, though no longer 
surrounded by the sea. 
(10.) Rutupiae or Ritapise, identified with Rich- 
borough in Kent. 
(11.) Octapitaron, the name given by Ptolemy to 
St. David's Head : it comes most likely from 
the forgotten language of the * non-Celtic 
inhabitants, and it occurs just in the vicinity 
of St. David's or Mynyw, called in the Welsh 
Chronicle Mont ludeorum^ which contains an 
allusion probably to the same people : we 
may add that an old legend speaks of Sts. 
Teilo and David as opposed there by a 
Pictish prince called Baia or Boia/ a name 
which occupies a place of importance in the 
story of the Deisi in the Book of the Dun Cow. 
(12.) Leucopibia, the name of a place somewhere in 

Galloway. 

(13.) Epidii, a name which we have already treated 

as akin with the name of the islands called 

Ebudae. 

It has already been hinted that some of the names 

given by the ancients to non-Brythonic peoples may, 

nevertheless, be themselves Brythonic, the reason 

being that the Romans came more in contact with 

Brythons, and got more of their information from 

them than from the other populations. This may 

possibly be the explanation of such a name as 

Leucopibia. Among the more evident instances may 

' See the "Liber Landavensis," pp. 94, 95, and the " Lives 
of the Cambro-British Saints," pp. 124-126. 



232 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

be mentioned that of the Caledonians, who are called 
by ancient authors Caledonii and Caledones, in both of 
which the stem Caledon would seem to belong to Bry- 
thonic, rather than to Goidelic, in which it would be 
Calidin or Caliden, as proved by the later forms. The 
difference of declension may be represented thus : the 
Goidelic inflections in point wTnt on the same lines 
as Latin words like virgo, a virgin, genitive virgin-is, 
nom. plural virgin-es, while the BryLhonic dialects 
gave the declension an evenness which did not 
originally belong to it, by repeating the vowel of the 
nominative singular in some or all of the other cases, 
as if we had in Latin virgo, virgonis, and so on, which 
in fact we sometimes have, as when the unattested 
form hemo yields an accusative hemonein for the more 
usual hominem corresponding to a nominative homo, 
man. Another instance offers itself in the name of the 
Decantae of northern Scotland, which is practically the 
same as that of the Decanti of Deganwy, near Llan- 
dudno, in North Wales, a place called Decantorum arx 
in the Welsh Chronicle. In both instances Decant- 
was probably the Brythonic pronunciation of Decnt-, 
which in the mouths of Goidels, who regularly rid 
themselves of the nasal in such cases, became at a 
comparatively early date the Decet- or Decet- of the in- 
scriptional name of Mac- Dechet on ancient monuments 
in Devon, Anglesey, and Ireland, among them being 
one of the largest early monuments of the kind in the 
British Islands, that standing on rising ground near a 
bay of the Kenmare River in the south-west of Ireland. 
It is doubtful whether the name of the Novantae is not 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF EARLY BRITAIN. 233 

likewise to be regarded as a merely Brythonic on^?, but 
it is less so in the case of a town of the Selgovse : we 
allude to Carbantorigon, on the eastern bank of the 
Nith, for it is not impossible that we have the same 
name abbreviated in the carvetior of a Roman in- 
scription on a stone at Penrith, in the neighbourhood 
of Carlisle, commemorating a man who had held a 
quDestorial office in the place it points to. If so, either 
a Goidelic language or a non-Celtic one was in use 
among the Selgovae at the time the epitaph in ques- 
tion was carved. It is in their country that was 
probably situated the place called Blatobulgion in the 
Antonine Itinerary, and supposed to have been near 
Middlcbie Kirk, not very far from the river Annan, 
in the county of Dumfries. 

In some instances another means of distinguishing 
between Brythonic and the other languages of Britain 
is supplied by the consonantal combination cs or x 
usual in Gaulish, but long ago reduced in the 
Brythonic dialects into ch and h : while in the 
Goidelic ones it was made somewhat later into ss or s. 
Now, about a dozen Latin words with x have been 
borrowed into WeLh, and in none of them has the 
X been reduced to ch, but in all to is or s, as also in 
the word Sais, a Saxon in the sense of English- 
man. It would seem that the change from x into 
ch was obsolete before the ancestors of the Welsh had 
adopted the Latin words in question, or even, perhaps, 
before they had been much in contact with the 
Romans. Among the instances which concern us 
here may be mentioned the Gaulish uxel- which 



234 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

appears in Welsh as uchel^ high ; while in Irish and 
Scotch Gaelic it is uasal^ high (in the metaphorical 
sense of high-born, noble or gentle) : the Bry- 
thonic form of this word is probably that which 
we have in the name of the Ochil Hills, in the 
country of the ancient Verturiones. It is remarkable, 
on the other hand, that most of the early names 
with X belong to districts which have before been 
pointed out as non-Brythonic. First may be men- 
tioned the people called Taexali, already spoken of. 
Then comes the mouth of a river Loxa, that can 
hardly be any other than the Lossie which falls into 
the Moray Firth in the land of the Vacomagi. Coming 
down South along the east of the island, we miss 
all names with x^ nor do we find any in the 
south until we r«.ach the country of the Dumnonii. 
There Ptolemy mentions a high town or high fort, 
called Uxella, and gives the estuary where the Taw 
and the Torridge meet the name of Vexalla. Proceed- 
ing noithwards, we come across a doubtful instance 
between Pennocrucion and Vriconion, which the 
manuscripts of the Antonine Itinerary, where it is 
mentioned, variously call Uxacona, Usoccona, and 
Uscocona, and we stop finally in the neighbourhood 
of the Solway Firth. There, in the country of the 
Selgovse, Ptolemy supplies us with another high town, 
called by him Uxellon, which must have been close 
to the mouth of the river Niih. But this is not all, 
since there was another high fort or high town, called 
Uxelodunon or Uxelodunion, situated at the mouth 
of the Ellen, on the coast of Cumberland, not far 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF EARLY BRITAIN. 235 

from the Derwent. Hence it may be inferred that, 
about the time of the coming of the Romans, a 
non-Brythonic people still possessed the shores of 
the Solvvay as far south as the river Derwent. Nay, 
possibly most of the lake district down to Morecambe 
Bay and Kendal, or still farther south, was peopled by 
a mixed race of Goidels and non-Celtic aborigines ; for 
Kendal has been sometimes supposed to be the site of 
the ancient Concangii, the name of which is probably 
non-Celtic, and reminds one vaguely of the De- 
ceangli, nearthe Dee, ofthatofthe Gangani, after whom 
Ptolemy names the westernmost point of Carnarvon- 
shire, and of that of the other Gangani, placed by 
the same geographer in the west of Ireland. After the 
building of the Roman Wall, by which those south of 
it were severed from their kinsmen north of it, the 
former probably soon lost their national character- 
istics and become Brythonicised, while the Selgovse 
remained perhaps to form, with the Novantse, the 
formidable people of the Atecotti, who afterwards gave 
Roman Britain so much to do, until their power was 
broken by Theodosius, who enrolled their able-bodied 
men in the Roman army, and sent them away to the 
Continent, where no less than four distinct bodies of 
them served at the time when the Table of Dignities 
was drawn up. They were a fierce and warlike 
people, but by the end of the Roman occupation they 
seem to have been subdued or driven beyond the Nith, 
and within the dyke^ which was, probably about that 
time, made from opposite the end of the Roman 
' See Skene's " Celtic Scotland," i p. 108. 



236 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

Wall across the upper parts of the valleys draining 
themselves into the Solway, so as to end at Loch 
Ryan : here the language of the inhabitants down to 
the sixteenth century was Goidelic. 

There are a few facts of another order which are 
to the point here, and foremost among them may be 
mentioned, that the later Brythons, whether such by 
blood or merely by adopting a Brythonic language, as 
in the case of iho^e of Cornwall and of parts of the 
north and of the south of Wales, agree in possessing 
legends about a great hero whom they call Arthur. 
Whether he was from the first a purely imaginary 
character in whom the best quahties of the race were 
supposed to meet, or had a solid foundation in the 
facts of a long forgotten history, it would be difficult 
to say ; but the popular imagination of the Brj thons 
had fully developed his attributes before the twelfth 
century. He appears as the ideal champion of the 
race, donning the armour of a Christian general 
to lead the Brythons to war against the pagan 
invaders, whether Picts or Germans. The fortunes 
of the Brythons were his concern, and their wars were 
his wars, so that their great battles were believed to 
have been fought under his command ; nay, he was 
related to have with his own hand slain in each conflict 
a marvellous number of the foe. Sometimes, how- 
ever, he is dimly seen in the background as a grand 
figure that does not descend into the arena : thus a 
Welsh poem^ in a manuscript of the 12th century, 
describing the feats of valour of the Dumnonian 
' Skene's " Ancient Books of Wales," ii. pp. 37, 38. 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF EARLY BRITAIN. 237 

prince Geraint in a battle fought probably with 
Ine of Wessex, speaks of Geraint's men as the men of 
Arthur : this was a long while, be it marked, after the 
time when Arthur is supposed to have lived. Now 
and then he even found his way into the chronicles ; 
but when that happened it was a good while after the 
date of the event in which he was supposed to have 
been concerned. Thus, according to Nennius, he it 
was that led the Brythons in the important battle of 
Badon Hill ; but Gildas, who felt a great interest in 
that battle, partly because it was fouglit in the year 
in which he himself was born, says nothing whatever 
about Arthur there or anywhere else. Had that 
Kymric Jeremiah lived a century or two later, he 
might have described Arthur's feats of superhuman 
prowess there at length. The Celts of Brittany 
regard Arthur as their own, so do those of Cornwall, 
though they have now adopted the language of their 
Enghsh neighbours, and so do the Kymry of Wales, 
while a most urgent claim has also been advanced 
in favour of the district between the Roman Walls. 
This is quite natural : Arthur belongs to them all, 
wherever Celts have spoken a Brythonic language, 
from the Morbihan to the Caledonian Forest. It is 
characteristic of such popular creations that they 
localize themselves readily here and there and every- 
where in the domain of the race in whose imagination 
they live and have their growth : the topography of 
Brythonic lands has no lack of Arthur's Hills, Arthur's 
Seats, Arthur's Quoits, Round Tables, and other be- 
longings of his and his followers. The results of the 



238 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

search made into Scotch topography by those who 
have undertaken to find the home and cradle of 
iVrthur in the north are partly puzzling and partly 
instructive. Passing by the abundant traces of him 
in the topography of the district between the Roman 
Walls, one fails to find any in the Brythonic country 
between Siirling on the Forth and Perth on the Tay, 
while one gets interesting instances in Strathmore 
and Forfarshire ;^ but it is as bard to believe that Arthur 
is not to be discovered in Fortrenn as it is to find any 
evidence of a Brythonic occupation extending to the 
neighbourhood of Forfar, and the subject deserves to 
be further studied. On the other hand, place-names, 
show that wherever the Goidel carried his language he 
also peopled the country with the creatures of his 
own story. Most of Scotland beyond the firths, 
including the district between the Earn and the Tay 
is found to have been, topographically speaking, pos- 
sessed by Finn, Oisin, Diarmait, and the other widely- 
ranging heroes of that group, who belong no less 
to Scotland than to Ireland, being in fact, as univer- 
sally Goidelic as Arthur and the Knights of the Round 
Table are the creatures of Brythonic story. If 
Arthur is to be treated as historical, the historian 
must look at him much in the same light as he 
does at Charlemagne, with all the legends that have 
gathered round his name. He will in that case find 
that the hero whom the Welsh sometimes call King 
Arthur, and sometimes Arthur the Emperor, falls 

' See Stuart Glennie's "Arthurian Localities" (Edinburgh, 
1869), pp. 36-40. 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF EARLY BRITAIN. 239 

readily into the place and position of a successor of 
the Count of Britain ; and in favour of that view might 
be cited the fact that Arthur's name might be explained 
as the Welsh form which the Kymry gave to the 
Latin Artorius} This would not be enough to prove 
that he was of Roman origin, though it could not help 
reminding one of the case of Aurelius Ambrosius. 

^ So far as we know, the credit of having first pointed this out 
belongs to Mr. Coote : see his "Romans of Britain," pp. 10, 
II, 189, 190. , 



240 CFLTIC BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 
(Continued.) 

So far we have tried to draw the outlines of an 
ethnological map of Britain : we now pause to fill in 
a detail here and there where data happen to offer 
themselves. Caesar tells us that the inhabitants of 
Britain in his day painted themselves with a dye 
extracted from woad ; by the time, however; of 
British independence under Carausius and Allectus, 
in the latter part of the third century, the fashion had 
so far fallen off in Roman Britain that the word J^ic/i, 
Picts, or painted men, had got to mean the nations 
beyond the Northern Wall : the people on the 
Solway were probably included under the same 
name, though they went also by the special desig- 
nation of Atecotti. Now, all these Picts were natives 
of Britain, and the word Picti is found apphed to 
them for the first time, in a panegyric by Eumenius, 
in the year 296 ; but in the year 360 another painted 
people appeared on the scene. They came from 
Ireland, and to distinguish these two sets of painted 
foes from one another, Latin historians left the 
painted natives to be called Picti, as had been the 



THE ETHNOLOGY OP BRITAIN. 24I 

custom before, and for the painted invadefs from 
Ireland, they retained, untranslated, a Celtic word, 
possibly of the same meaning, or nearly the same 
meaning, namely, Scotti. These older peoples, how- 
ever, were known by a common name, which described 
them in Celtic as painted men. Rather we should 
say it did more : it connoted the embellishment of 
the person, which the tattooing was supposed to 
effect. This word was Cruthni,i which is found 
applied equally to the painted people of both islands, 
though one detects somewhat of a tendency on the 
part of the chroniclers to draw a distinction, the Irish 
Picts being more persistently called Cruthni, Latinized 
Cruthenii or Crutheni, while the compound Cruithen- 
tuath or the nation of the Picts, was mostly appro- 
priated to the Picts of Britain north of the Forth, who 
were also termed Piccardach, suggested by the Latin 
Picti, Pictones, Pictores, all of which terms and more 
have been used in reference to them. The eponymus 
of all the Picts was Cruithne, and we have the corre- 
sponding Brythonic form in Prydyn, the name by 
which Picts and Pictland or Scotland once used to 
be known to the Kymry. An earlier Welsh form of 
Prydyn is Priten, and later ones are Prydein and 
Prydain; for our island is in Welsh Ynys Prydain 
" Prydain's Island " or Island of the Picts, pointing to 
the original underlying the Greek Ilperai/tm/ Nr/^ot or 
" Pictish Isles." This, under the influence of the name 

1 It occurs as Cruthnc in the gen. plural in the Book of the 
Dun Cow, iol. 70a ; late writers, however, prefer the adjectival 
form Cruithnig ; nom. singular, Cruithnech, 

R 



242 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

of the Brythons, hperraroi, became at last i^pertaviical 
Ni/a-o<, that is to say, " Brythonic Isles " The Picts have 
sometimes been called in Welsh literature, Gwyddyl 
Ffichti^ Goidelic Picts, or Pictish Goidels, Ffichti is 
not the regular rendering of Picti into Welsh, and 
it is not, we think, found in manuscripts earlier than 
the fourteenth century, so that this clumsy translation 
of Scotti Picti has not the importance which has some- 
times been ascribed to it. The words Cruihni and 
Pryd) n are derived from cruth and pjyd respectively, 
which mean form, and an Irish shanachie ^ has rightly 
explained the former as meaning a people who painted , 
the forms (crotha) of beasts, birds, and fishes on their 
faces, and not on their faces only, but on the whole 
of the body. Herodian states that they did not 
wear clothes lest they should conceal the pictures. 
This agrees with Claudian's vivid description of 
Stilicho's soldiery, scanning the figures punctured 
with iron on the body of the fallen Pict, and with the 
much later reference to the term Cruthni, which we 
seem to have in Isidore of Seville's words in the sixth 
century, when he wrote that the Scotti were named 
in their own tongue from their painting the body, 
since, as he went on to say, they were tattooed by 
means of iron points and ink, with the marking of 
various figures.^ 

' Duald Mac Firbis, quoted by Todd in a note on the Irish 
version of Nennius, p. vi. ; see also Herodian iij., 14, § 8. 

^ For this and other passages in point see Skene's " Chronicles 
of the Picts and Scots," pp. 393-395, also p. 137. 



THE ETHNOLOGV OP BRlTAltf. 243 

The word Scotti^ itself, as already hinted, appears 
to have referred to the same habit, as we have in 
Welsh the kindred words — ysgwthr, a cutting, carving 
or sculpturing, and ysgythru, to cut, lop, prune, to do 
the sculptor's work ; but the word also occurs meaning 
to dye or paint, though it is not quite clear whether 
this latter be not a signification derived from that of 
carving or sculpturing, by some such intermediate step 
as that of tattooing, or embossing, or mosaic work. 
Thus the word Scotti would seem to mean simply 
painted men, or else — and this is, on the whole, the 
more probable view — it meant persons who were cut, 
scored or scarred. That would, at first sight, seem 
a forced explanation of the name, but it will be found, 
that, though the people who tattooed themselves re 
garded it as a way of beautifying their persons, others 
who did not practise it usually took quite the contrary 
view of the effect. Among the latter may be cited the 
legates of Pope Adrian, who, in reporting^ to him 
their proceedings in Britain, in 787, speak of God as 
having made man beautiftil, and of the pagans of 
this country as "having by a diabolical impulse added 
to him most foul scars," and they further remark that, 
" if anyone endured for God's sake this injury of 
being dyed, he would therefore certainly receive a 
great reward." Such a name, then, as Scotti, if we 
are not mistaken as to its meaning, is probably not 

' 1 he word occurs for the first time in Ammiaaus Marcellinus's 
account (xx. i) of an invasion of Roman Britain by the Scots 
and the Picts in the year 360. 

'^ Haddan and Stubbs, " Councils," «&c., iii. p. 458. 

R 2 



244 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

one which that people gave itself: it is to be traced, 
rather, to the Brythons of Roman Britain, and the 
Welsh words cited favour this view. Moreover, the 
fact has usually been overlooked that it is a term 
which has practically only come down to modern 
times as the Latin word for natives of Ireland 
or their descendants. So the Welshman or the 
Irishman, who would speak in his own language 
of a Gwyddel or Goidel, rendered it into Scottus as 
soon as he had occasion to write Latin ; and from 
that was formed in due time Scottia or Scotia, as 
the name for Ireland instead of Hibernia. It is 
needless to say that the word Scotia has no formation 
corresponding to it in any Celtic language : it is 
found used first by Isidore, but by the end of the 
seventh century Adamnan, a native of Ireland, 
employs it in writing Latin. Eventually, the old name 
reasserted itself, and the new one, having passed over 
into Scotland in the modern sense of the word, took 
root in its new home, and was fully established there 
durmg the War of Independence. The term Scotti 
was made in Irish into Scuit, but this is hardly ever 
to be met with in Irish literature, and its appearance 
there is probably only due to the importance 
of Scotti in Latin. Among other things it was too 
tempting not to associate it with Scythia, and hence 
there sprang up a number of tales relating how the 
Irish came from that country to Ireland ; this was, 
of course, only a part of the crop of etymological 
speculations, which not only connected the Picts with 
the Gaulish Pictones and Pictavi whose names survive 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 245 

in those of Poitiers and Poitou, but with any other 

people to whom the ad jective //V^?/j' had been appHed 

by Latin authors. Thus Vergil's allusion^ to the Geloni 

in the Une, 

" Eoasque domos Arabum pictosque Gelonos," 

did not fail to lead to the identification with the Irish 

of more than one tribe descended from Hercules.^ 

But to whom did the name Scotti originally apply 

before the indiscriminate use of the word as the Latin 

equivalent for the plural Goidil ? Supposing we have 

made an approach to the true meaning of the word, 

it could only have denoted those of the Irish who 

continued the old fashion of tattooing themselves : 

when those of a corner of the island got to be 

known as Cruthni, or Picts, most of the inhabitants 

of Ireland must have abstained from the practice 

of tattooing their persons. Whatever the meaning 

of the word Scotti may have been, there is no reason 

to think that it originally denoted most or all of the 

people of Ireland, for as far back as we can penetrate 

they have never been known to the Kymry but by the 

name Goidel, in Welsh Gwyddel. Now, the portion 

of Ireland best known to history as Pictish was a 

pretty well defined district, consisting of the present 

county of Antrim and most of that of Down. The 

northern half or so of the former was the home of the 

descendants of Riada or the Dal-Riada, whence the 

Dalriad Scots of Argyle, while another tract of that 

Pictish peninsula belonged to the descendants of 

' "Georgics," ii. 115. 

2 gee the " Irish Nennius," pp, xxxix. 49, 



246 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

Araide and Fiatach or the Dal-nAraide and Dal- 
Fiatach, who continued to be commonly known as 
Cruthni for a long time. But this only represents a 
last stage of the Cruthnian shrinkage, for the Ivernian 
people of Ulster, called not only Cruthni, but also, and 
more commonly, Ulaid, " Ulidians or Ultonians," and 
Fir Ulaid, " Ulidians Proper or True Ultonians," to 
distinguish them from the Goidelic conquerors of 
Ulster, are said to have in early times possessed Tara 
under their famous king, Ollam Fodla. In a more 
historical period we find them retreating northwards, 
and making Emain Macha, '• the Navan Fort " near 
Armagh, their headquarters. A long time afterwards 
they are again in retreat, to wit, to the corner of 
Ul-ter east of Loch Neagh and the river Bann. To 
this they were forced by the Goidelic conquests 
made from Meath by the Three Collas, who wrested 
from them the whole of Ulster from Loch Neagh 
westwards, slew their king, and razed their capital. 
This decisive war, with the crowding of the Fir Ulaid 
into the north-east corner of their territory, is placed 
by the Four Masters in the year 327, and if that date 
is even approximately correct, one can hardly doubt that 
the Scotti, joining the.Picts of Britain in 360, (p. 243) 
hailed from the narrowed realm of the Cruthnian 
Ulaid. We may take it that they had begun to come 
across years earlier, but that in the year 360 they had 
arrived in such numbers as to prove a serious danger 
to the province. Once, however, these Cruthnians 
had learned the way into the heart of the Roman 
province, other adventurers eager for plunder may 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 247 

have joined them, or taken routes of their own, 
though Gildas distinctly states that the Scotti set 
out from the north-west. This agrees well with 
the fact that where Netherby now stands, to which 
the waters of the Sol way once reached, there w^as 
at one time a Roman station called by the sig- 
nificant name of Castra Exploratorum, or the Camp 
of the Scouts ; that at Netherstall, near Maryport, at 
the mouth of the river Ellen in Cumberland, where 
Uxelodunon stood, there was in the time of Hadrian 
a fleet under the command of M. M^nius Agrippa, 
whose name appears in several inscriptions from that 
neighbourhood ; and that later, when the Selgovse had 
been disposed of, the remainder of the non-Brythonic 
people on the Solway were enclosed by a rampart from 
the end of that firth to Loch Ryan,i as already men- 
tioned at p. 235 above. It is probable that it was 
in their country the Irish invaders usually organized 
their expeditions southwards all the time they con- 
tinued to come over. 

It has, however, been sometimes supposed that it 
was in AVales the Irish invaders habitually landed. 
They may have done so occasionally, as in the case of 
the Deisi, the date of whose coming to Dyved is, never- 
theless, uncertain : we may say toward the end of 
the third century. But it is highly improbable that it 
was the usual resort, as it was a country neither rich 
in booty nor easy to penetrate. Besides, had Wales 
been much exposed to such visitations, it would 
be in the highest degree remarkable that not a 
' Skene's '■ Celtic Scotland," i. 108, 



248 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

single regiment of soldiers was located there by the 
Romans at the date of the compiling of the Table of 
Dignities, all being quartered in the north or the 
south-east of the province. Welsh tradition has 
been invoked to prove the invasion of Wales from 
Ireland in the fourth and fifth centuries, and medieval 
travesties of the history of the incursions of the Danes, 
especially those settled at Dublin, have been bfindly 
brought forward in evidence. This is too fruitless 
a subject to discuss at length, and an instance or 
two will serve to show what has been sometimes 
done : — " Anlach, son of Coronac," is moved back to 
this period by writers who do not detect in him the 
well known Dane, Anlaf Cuaran, and, similarly, the 
leader of the Goidels in their last battle with " Caswall- 
on Lawhir," is called Serrigi or Sirigi, possibly a 
corrupt form of some personal name torn out of a 
Latin context, while Caswallon turns out to have been 
a Welsh prince of the tenth century, and not the father 
of Maelgwn in the sixth. In both instances the name 
was Cadwallon before it was improved into that 
of the ancient general, Cassivellaunos, who fought 
against Julius Caesar. There are many more similar 
pitfalls into which Welsh legendary history is wont to 
lead the unsuspecting. What has usually been regarded 
as evidence for the invasion of Wales from Ireland 
proves on examination to be no such thing ; but the 
references we have made to the Deisi of Dyved will 
prevent the conclusion from being drawn, that no 
evidence of the kind exists at all. However, the 
author finds the data so slender, and the difficulties 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 249 

involved SO considerable, especially as to determining 
which of the Goidels of the West of Britain represented 
the ancient inhabitants, and which of them were in- 
vaders from the sister island, that he must content 
himself with merely warning the reader that the 
question is answered in different ways, some scholars 
being of the opinion that all Goidelic peoples in Britain 
are to be traced to Ireland. He prefers to think that 
the Goidels of the districts in point were partly of the 
one origin and partly of the other : in any case, 
Goidels they were, and their language continued 
to exist in Wales down to the end probably of 
the seventh century, possibly somewhat later in 
out-of-the-way corners of the country. To fix the 
time of its utter disappearance would be impossible, 
but Dr. Hiibner, the greatest German epigraphist 
who has studied the inscriptions of Britain, places 
one^ of them, written in Latin and Goidelic, and found 
on the south of the Teivi, near Cardigan, among 
those which he assigns to the seventh or possibly 
to the eighth century, the classification being mainly 
based on the forms of the letters used. 

When those of our early inscriptions, which are non- 
Roman and begin to date soon after the departure of 
the legions, have their localities marked on a map of 
Wales, it is found that hardly any of them occur 
in what was the country of the Ordovices : they 
may be said to crowd together in the tract within 
the Clwyd, the Dee, and the Mawddach in North 
Wales, while in South Wales they form two groups ; 
1 " Inscrip. Brit. Chmt.," No. 108. 



250 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

an eastern one around a line drawn from Brecon to 
Neath in Glamorgan ; and the other, the more im- 
portant one, in the district west of the basin of the 
Towy. All the inscriptions belong to Christian times, 
but it is not to be concluded that the people of the 
epigraphic area were converted to Christianity before 
those of the rest of the country. For not only were 
Cunedda and his people Christians, but it was by 
members of the former's family, or by men who en- 
joyed its protection, that Christianity was mainly, so 
far as we know it, spread among the Goidels ; and, even 
if they were Christians previously, it is from the Cu- 
nedda saints that the organization of the Church in Wales 
has come down to us, so that whatever Christianity 
existed among the Goidels before their labours, was 
so completely covered by the latter as to have been 
almost wholly forgotten. Thus, so far as we know, 
St. David was the first who systematically undertook to 
Christianize the people of Dyved or Demetia ; he was 
grandson to Keredig, who gave its name to Keredi- 
gion and was son of Cunedda. Next comes Kentigern, 
who founded the bishopric of St. Asaph : he did so 
under -the protection of Cadwallon, Maelgwn's father; 
and it was under the auspices of Maelgwn himself, 
that Daniel, or, as he is called in Welsh, Deinioel, be- 
came the first bishop of Bangor in Arvon, whither he 
came from the great monastic establishment at Bangor 
on the Dee. We have, then, to look elsewhere for the 
explanation of the comparative lack of inscriptions in 
the Br) thonic area of Wales, and we are forced to 
believe that it arose from a difference in the manner of 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 25 1 

burying the dead. Among the first things to strike one 
is the fact that the country of the Ordovices is almost 
wholly devoid of those rude stone structures called 
cromlechs, which are found to crowd together in the 
same districts as the inscriptions, especially in the 
island of Mona and the county of Pembroke : the 
conclusion darkly suggests itself that it was the same 
race that set up the cromlechs and erected the 
maenhirs or longstone monuments of the Principality. 
Probably we should not be far wrong in considering the 
maenhir to be as old, to say the least of it, as the crom- 
lech, and merely a less elaborate way of attaining the 
same object, that of commemorating the dead ; but the 
relative age of these is a question which archaeology 
cannot be said to have seriously considered, or even 
perhaps clearly formulated, though it undertakes to 
distinguish the burial-places of the Celts from those 
of the pre-Celtic peoples of Britain, the former having 
the round barrows assigned to them, and the latter the 
long ones. This may be correct in the main, and it 
may be that the arch^ologist has no data to help him 
to more exact results, but he should bear in mind that 
his study of the tombs falls short of the historian's 
wish so long as he cannot tell the resting-place of a 
Brython from that of a Goidel, and both from those of 
the neolithic native. The two last would seem from 
the latest archaeological investigations to have buried 
in long barrows, but some of those barrows contain 
the dead placed with care to sit grimly in their 
subterranean houses, while others disclose only the 
huddled bones of men and beasts, as though they 



252 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

were the remains of cannibal feasting?. Can they be 
ascribed to the same race? If so, what was the 
meaning of the revolution which took place in their 
mode of burial, and what did it signify as rtgards their 
religious belief? 

As to the people of the Belgo-Brythonic branch, 
who were not given to the erection of great stone 
monuments, there is no difficulty in supposing them 
to ha^'e continued in Christian times their use of the 
barrows, of which so many scores are known clus- 
tering around the ancient temple of Stonehenge, and 
in other parts of the country. Now, the mound of 
earth which we call a barrow or a tumulus, offered no 
great opportunities for the writer of epitaphs, but the 
maenhirs did : it may be assumed that, when the 
Goidels became acquainted with writing and had the 
example of the Romans before their eyes, they not un- 
willingly began to imitate them in having their monu- 
ments lettered. But a survey of the latter, both in 
Britain and Ireland, gives one the impression that their 
chief consideration was still the size and durability 
of the stone used ; it might be inscribed or not, that 
was an afterthought and a luxury unknown to their 
ancestors. But, in case any writing was indulged in, 
the language in this country was usually Lalin, which 
seems to have continued to be the official and learned 
tongue. In about two dozen instances, h^^wever, the 
Goidelic language was used mostly to accompany 
a Latin version, and written in a peculiar character 
called Ogam. Possibly that kind ot writing was in- 
vented by a Goidelic native of Siluria or Demetia, who, 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 253 

having acquired a knowledge of the Roman alphabet, 
and some practice in a simple system of scoring 
numbers, elaborated the latter into an alphabet of his 
own fitted for cutting on stone or wood. From South 
Wales we might presume it to have been introduced to 
Ireland, especially the south and south-west ; and, on 
the other hand, to Devon, but rather sparingly so far as 
one can discover, to Cornwall, and more sparingly still to 
North Wales, while the Ogams of Scodand need not be 
discussed, as they seem to be mostly of later introduc- 
tion, showing traces of the influence of manuscript 
writing on parchment. The argument from numbers 
points to Ireland as the country where Ogmic writing 
was invented, and it must also be admitted that there 
are certain features of the Ogam alphabet which Latin 
letters cannot have suggested. It is emphatically the 
work of a grammarian, who is possibly to be regarded 
as representing the linguistic science of the more 
learned class of Druids in ancient Erin. 

Looking at the Ogam epitaphs of Ireland, of which 
more than 200 are said to have existed, and most 
of which are still extant, chiefly in the counties of 
Waterford, Cork, and Kerry, one finds that, though 
they belong to Christian times, the burial-places 
in which they occur are frequently unconnected 
with churches, and used only for interring un- 
baptized persons, or else no longer used at all : 
thus it would seem that they are the old pagan 
burial-places, continued in use in Christian times 
by a Christian people. The stones are, in many 
instances, the objects of a reverence bordering very 



254 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

closely on worship, a state of things of which we find 
a trace in the Welsh legend^ about St. David splitting 
with a stroke of his sword the capstone of the cromlech 
in Gower, called Maen Cetti, in order to show to the 
people that it had no divine attributes : thereupon they 
are said to have been converted to his religion. But 
the belief in such stones was probably far too deeply 
rooted to be readily got rid of, and the Church 
possibly had no difficulty in making them arti- 
culate witnesses to a kind of merit recognised by a 
class of inscriptions in Wales, dating usually about 
the eighth century or later, and having nothing 
exactly corresponding to them in any other part of 
western Christendom. One, for instance, runs thus : — 
" The cross of Christ : Enniaun made it for the soul 
of Guorgoret ; " and another thus: — "In the name 
of God the highest begins the cross of the Saviour, 
which Samson, the abbot, prepared for his own soul 
and for that of Ithel, the king," &c. Another one, how- 
ever, near Bridgend has been supposed to be of the 
beginning of the seventh century, and it runs thus : — • 
" Conbellini set up this cross for the soul of his scitli- 
vissi." The last word is unmistakably Goidelic, and 
must have meant a man who acted as an emissary or 
scout. But this class of inscriptions is not to be 
severed from another w^hich is still better known, espe- 
cially in Ireland. It may be illustrated by the follow- 
ing specimen from Gwnnws in Cardiganshire : — "Who- 
ever shall have read this name let him give a blessing 
on behalf of the soul of Hiroidil, son of Carotinn," 
' lulo MSS., p 83, 



THE ETiiNOLOGY OF feRlTAlN. 2^5 

the name alluded to being a figure forming a sort of 
wheel-cross supplemented by the monogram of Christ 
X p s^. 

As regards the older inscriptions, they seem to 
show that by the sixth century the Ordovices had 
carried their Brythonic speech into the district north 
of the Mawddach, and even into that portion of the 
modern county of Carnarvon which consists of the 
old deanery of Eivionydd, and looks, as it were, to- 
wards Harlech ; but the country from the Mawddach 
to the north of Eivionydd was made up of Ardudwy 
and Eivionydd, which together are sometimes called 
Dunodig, from Dunod, a son of Cunedda, who is 
said to have conquered it from the Goidels. How far 
Brythonic speech had then penetrated into the neigh- 
bourhood of Snowdon it is impossible to say ; but 
traces of an Ogam inscription have recently been dis- 
covered near Brynkir in Eivionydd, and there is a 
well-known bilingual epitaph which was found as far 
east as Clocaenog, near Ruthin, in the basin of the 
Clwyd. In South Wales most of Cardiganshire was 
probably still Goidelic, though it had long been con- 
quered by the Cuneddafamily under the ruleof Keredig. 
But not only had all the country north of a line from 
the Wyre to the bend of the Wye near Talgarth, in 
Brecknockshire, or thereabouts, become Brythonic 
by this lime, but the Goidelic country south of it 
seems, if we may trust the indications afforded by the 

^ The inscriptions are respectively Nos. 73, 62, 67, and 122 
in Hlibner's " Inscrip. Brit. Christ." ; see also Westwood's 
" Lapid. Walliae/' pp. 144, 145, plate 68. 



256 ■ CELTIC BRITAIN. 

inscriptions, to have been severed into two regionSj 
of which the one lay west of the Towy, and the other 
on both sides of a Hne drawn from Brecon to Neath, 
in Glamorgan. More exactly speaking, the latter con- 
sisted of two distinct district;^, a southern one between 
Cardiff and Loughor, and a northern one in the upper 
valley of the Usk, with Brecon as its central poin% 
and taking in the old deaneries of Brecon, probably 
the ancient patrimony of Brychan, who has so large a 
place in Welsh hagiology. Both he and his nume- 
rous offspring may have been more Goidelic than 
Brythonic, though they were allied in various ways 
with the Cunedda family. The country east of these 
two districts, from the hills of Brecknock and the 
lower course of the Taff, seems to have become 
Brythonic : when and how, it is very hard to say. It 
was brought about partly, perhaps, by the influence 
of the nearest Brythonic tribes east ot the Severn, as 
suggested by the fact that one of the most important 
inscriptions of ancient Glamorgan commemorates a 
prince called Bodvoci,i a name at once Gaulish and 
Brythonic, which had been in esteem among the 
Dobunni, on whose gold coins it figured before they 
submitted to the Roman yoke. It was partly due 
also, no doubt, to conquests by the Ordovices in the 
direction of the mouth of the Severn. The history 
of these conquests, however, is lost, but attention has 
already been called to the power of Maelgwn over 
all parts of South ^^'ales, and we have possibiy a proof 

1 See Hlibner's *' Inscrip. trit. Christianse," No 71, and 
Ebys's " Lectures on Welsh Philology," p. 86. 



THE ETHNOLOGY OP BRITAIN. • 257 

of the southern advance of the Ordovices in Dinas 
Powys, the name of a place in the vicinity of Cardiff. 
The epigraphic map, if we may use the term, further 
suggests that the eastern Goidehc districts were cut 
off from connection with the western one by a 
strip of Brythonic land, reaching from the country 
of the Ordovices to the basin of the Towy, and 
down the eastern bank of that river to the sea. 
This, it will be seen, would include the district of 
Kidwelly, from which, together with Gower, Nen- 
nius^ expressly mentions the driving out of the 
Goidels by Cunedda and his sons. But Welsh tradi- 
tion sometimes ascribes the expulsion to Cunedda 
and Urien of Rheged, and sometimes to the latter 
alone. The districts in question are specified 
to have been Gower and Kidwelly, together with 
Carnwyllon and Iscennen, between the Tawe and the 
Towy, together with its tributary the Cothi.^ Nennius 
mentions Urien as one of the four kings of the 
Brythons opposed to Hussa, who began his reign 
over Bernicia in the year 567. The reason for his 
leaving the North is probably to be sought in the 
feuds which culminated in the great battle of 
Arderydd in 573, when the combatants on both sides 
are surmised to have been Celts. The conquests of 
Urien in the land of the southern Goidels do not 
appear to have formed an integral part of the Cunedda 
legend, so we seem to be at liberty to place them 
in this part of the sixth century. It is needless to 

' Mommsen's "Chronica Minora," iii. 14 (p. 156). 
2 lolo MSS., pp. 70, 71. 

S 



25B CfiLTiC BRITAIN. 

say that they were hardly undertaken without the 
leave of the over-king of the Cunedda dynasty. These 
measures may have been called for by the Goidels 
trying to make fresh conquests, and Urien, who 
could, for some reason or other, be spared from the 
North, may have been made use of to crash them with 
his following of Brythons. In any case the result must 
have practically put an end for ever to the aspirations 
of the Goidels in South Wales, if they had any. There 
are other indications to the same effect, especially 
in the legendary life of St. David, written by Rhy- 
gyvarch, bishop of St. David's, in the latter part of 
the eleventh century. We are there told of a severe 
struggle^ between the saint and the prince called 
Boia. This Pagan chief, sometimes called a Scot 
and sometimes a Pict, was, of course, discomfited 
by the miracles said to have been wrought by David : 
in due time both he and his wife came to a bad 
end, which may be taken to mean that the saint was 
backed to such an extent by the power of the Cunedda 
family, to which he belonged on the father's side, 
that local opposition was of no avail against him. The 
king of Demetia in Gildas's time is by him called (in 
the vocative) Vortipori^ a non-Goidelic name, which 
may be regarded as evidence of Brythonic influence in 
the country : the name appears in the Nennian genea- 
logies in the Welsh form of Guortepir, borne by a son 
of Aircol, whose name m.ust be the AVelsh reduction 
of the Latin Agricola. Aircol's father was Triphun^ 
* It has been alluded to at p, 231 ; see also " Cambro-Brit. 

ss.,"pp. 1 17-143 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. ^59 

which also seems to be a non-Goidelic name, but 
Triphun and his Sons are said to have been the 
princes of Demetia at the time of St. David's birth. 
During some part of King Triphun's reign, Keredigion 
seems to have been ruled by Sanctus or Sant, the 
son of Keredig, and the father of St. David : accord- 
ing to the legendary life of his son, Sant had become a 
monk, and gone to Demetia, where he met the nun 
who became the mother of St. David : the incident is 
easier to understand if we suppose him to have been 
at the time not only king of Keredigion, but possessed 
of power enough in Demetia to enable him to do 
there much as he liked. In any case, the king of 
Demetia does not seem to have had much authority 
left to him as against the princes of the house of 
Cunedda. The ancestors of Triphun had possibly 
made the best of the situation by adopting the religion 
of the dominant race, and allying themselves by 
marriage with the Cunedda dynasty. However that 
may be, the princes of his house affected non- 
Goidelic names, though they derived their origin 
from Ireland, being, as they were, descended from 
the Deisi exiles. The proof of this is to be found in 
the agreement between their pedigree as given in the 
legend of the Deisi and in the Nennian Genealogies.^ 

^ The former is given in the Bodley MSS., Laud Misc. 610, 
and Ravvlinsoa B. 502, already alluded to, and the latter in the 
Harleian MS. 3,859, where the portion of Triphun's genealogy 
which should show the Irish descent is replaced by a fabrication 
which includes as his remote ancestors both Maximus and Con- 
stantine. It will be found printed in the pedigree of Elen wife 
to Howel the Good, in the preface to Williams' "Ann. Cam- 
bria;.," p. X. See aho the "Arch. Cambrensis," 1892, p. 64. 

S 2 



260 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

We are reminded by it that the words of Nehnius as to 
the expulsion of the Scotti are not to be interpreted too 
literally ; for, as their princes in Dyved were allowed 
to remain, it is not likely that the clansmen were 
driven out of the country. The power of the Goidels 
here had probably been broken ever since the con- 
quests of Keredig, who was doubtless the Coroticus of a 
letter^ of St. Patrick, in which the saint holds him up 
to detestation on account of the cruelty of his men 
towards certain converted Goidels whom they had 
taken captive. To revert to St. David, it is important 
to bear in mind that he was probably a Goidel, on the 
mother's side : this explains, at least in part, why his 
labours were always directed to the Goidehc districts, 
and also why men from Ireland came to sit at his feet. 
It, moreover, gives a meaning to a curious passage in 
his life, which describes how Gildas's preaching in 
Demetia was, once on a time, brought to an abrupt 
end by the mysterious influence of the greatness of 
David, even when he happened to be present only in 
embryo. The story seems to make the difference be- 
tween the two men in point of age too great; but the fact 
it dimly sets forth is that Gildas, who was a Brython of 
the Brythons, could not hope for the same following 
among the Goidels as a man, who to his connexion 
with a powerful Brythonic family added probably a 
native's knowledge of Goidelic speech and complete 
sympathy with everything Goidelic except Goidelic 
paganism. But it is in Cadoc that we find David's 

' Published by Haddan and Stubbs in their " Councils and 
Eccles. Documents," ii. pp. 314-319. 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 26 1 

most formidable rival. Cadoc, like his brother saint, 
may have been connected by blood with the house of 
Cunedda, but whether that was so or not, he seems to 
have had the support of Maelgwn, its redoubtable head ; 
and, like David, he seems to have possessed the 
qualifications calculated to make his ministration 
acceptable to the Goidels. The reputation, however, 
which he has left behind him is rather one for learning 
and wisdom ; while churches dedicated to David are 
to be found here and there in all parts of South Walts, 
except that which formed the old diocese of St. Padarn. 
The Brythonic people, who may be presumed to 
have buried in barrows, have left us an inscription 
in Montgomeryshire, and another in Merionethshire, 
in both of which the deceased is said to have 
been placed in a barrow or mound — in tumulo : the 
same expression occurs also in an epitaph rfot very 
far from Edinburgh, and another near Yarrow kirk, in 
the county of Selkirk. This contrasts with the great 
majority of the epitaphs from the Goidelic parts of 
Wales and Dumnonia, in which we are simply told that 
the deceased " lies," jacit, or " lies here," hie jacit. 
There are, however, a few of the former description on 
Goidelic ground or on its boundaries : one such occurs 
in Cornwall, one or possibly two in South Wales, and 
there is a curious one in Carnarvonshire in which the 
dead man is said to lie in a congeries lapidum or cairn of 
stones.i All the above interments belonged, probably, 

1 See Hiibner, Nos. 125, 131, 211, 209, 7, 52, 234, 136; 
compare also Kuhn's " Beitr£ege," iii, p. 73i where Stokes gives 
Gaulish and Irish parallels, 



262 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

to Brythons, or were made under the influence of the 
Brythonic fashion which was spreading among the Goi- 
dels. Compared with the other and more numerous epi- 
taphs, ihey are on an average longer and fuller, more in 
accordance with the Roman custom, and characterized 
by a greater variety of formula, which would seem to 
show that they appertained to a people more given to 
writing than the Goidels can have been, though the 
latter made more frequent use of it in honouring the 
dead. It is probably with these Brythonic burials 
that we have to class the grass-grown cairn, removed 
in 1832, ia the immediate neighbourhood of Mold, in 
Flintshire. The spot was called Bryn yr Ellyllon 
" the Elves' Knoll," and it was believed in the 
country around to be haunted by a spectre in gold 
armour. When more than 300 loads of stones had 
been carted away the workmen came to a cist vvith 
the following contents : (i) The sl<eleton of a tall 
and powerful man placed at full length. (2) A richly 
embossed gf 'Id peytrel^ (French poitrail) or brunt for 
a pony of about 12 hands like the famous Welsh 
breed of the present day : it measured about 3 ft. 7 ins. 
by a central depth of 8 J ins., and was mounted on a 
copper plate provided with a fringe of coarse cloth. 
(3) Some three hundred amber beads. Traces of 
something made of iron are said to have been 
detected, and two or three yards from the cist was 
found standing a cinerary urn full of ashes. The 

^ It is one of the treasures in the British Museum : see Read's 
Guide, pp. 149-51, and Boyd Dawkins',s Early Man in Britain, 

PP- 431 "33- 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 263 

burial belongs to the end of the Bronze Age, when 
cremation was not entirely obsolete in this country, 
and when gold cannot have been scarce. We should 
probably not be wrong in attributing it to the time of 
the Roman occupation. On the whole, the duty of 
commemorating the dead among the Celts may be 
supposed to have devolved on the bards to whom we 
are probably indebted for the seventy or more stanzas 
devoted to this object in the Black Book of Carmar- 
then, a Welsh manuscript of the twelfth century. ^ 
The last of them, strangely enough, has to do with 
a grave in the same neighbourhood of Mold, and it 
runs as follows when freely rendered into English : 
nay, it is not impossible that one of its references is 
to him of Bryn yr Ellyllon. 

Whose the grave in the great glade ? 
ProuJ was his hand on his blade — 
There Beli, giant Benlli's son, is laid. 

A word now respecting the people whom the Celts 
found in possession of the island when they came 
here : little is known for certain about them, though a 
good deal may be inferred, as we have frequently had 
occasion to suggest. From the nature of the case 
the first Celtic invaders, that is to say, the Celts of 
the Goidelic branch, were those who had most to do 
with the aborigines, and it may be doubted whether 
the Brythons and Belgae ever came much in contact 
with them. So when they adopted Celtic speech and 
habits, it was those of the Goidels they learnt and not 
of the Brythons ; and, looked at from the opposite 

» gee Skene's " Four Ancjeiit Books of Wales," pp. 28^35. 



264 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

point of view, it is hardly open to doubt that the 
Goidelic race was profoundly modified in many 
respects by its absorption and assimilation of the 
indigenous element. Indeed, it has been well said 
that "the term Goidelic should strictly be confined 
to the mixed population of Aryan and non-Aryan 
language in possession of the country when the 
Brythons arrived."^ It is here, in fact, we are to look 
for the explanation of a good deal of the difference of 
speech between the Welsh and the Irish, not to 
mention that the study of the skulls of the present 
inhabitants of the British Islands, and of their physique 
and complexion, has convinced anthropologists that 
we still have among us a large number of men who 
are at least in part the descendants of non-Aryan 
ancestors. In fact we seem to detect their influence 
on the Goidels even within the narrow circle of their 
ancient inscriptions. The subject is a difficult one, 
and we can only touch it superficially. The full 
Aryan proper name was of the class to which such 
instances as the Greek OEo-^iopog and Awpo-deog 
belong, from Oeoc, god, and cojpoi', sl gift; and abun- 
dance of names compounded in the same easy way 
are to be found in every Celtic language ; besides 
these the Goidels have others which are not com- 
pounds, and to which the other Aryan languages 

' See Read's Guide, p. 22. This text could be readily illus- 
trated by indicating some of the differences between the oldest 
Goidelic of Ogmic epigraphy and the non-Gaulish Celtic of the 
Coligny Calendar, for which see the Rev. Celtique, xix. 213-23, 
plates i.-vi,j and Nicholson's '" Keltic Researches," pp. ii6-2§. 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 265 

offer few parallels. An instructive instance is such a 
name as Maelumi or Mael-Umi, the slave or servant 
of bronze, which possibly testifies to a national devo- 
tion to the bronze sword, a weapon which the ancient 
Irish regarded as inspired and capable, among 
other things, of giving the lie to the perjurer : mael 
means shorn or tonsured, and here refers, probably, 
to the tonsure with which the Goidels were familiar 
as denoting servitude, even before the Church intro- 
duced a somewhat different observance among 
them. They went on forming Christian names in 
the same fashion, as may be learned from sach well- 
known instances as Mael-Padraic, Patrick's slave, and 
Gille-Crist, Christ's servant, Anglicized respectively 
into Mulpatrick and Gilchrist.^ Another word used 
in the same way was mug or 7iiog^ a slave, as in 
the proper name, Mog-Nuadat, Nuada's-Slave, where 
Nuada — in Welsh, Nudd and Lludd, better known in 
English as Lud — was a name of the god of the sea. 
Irish legend makes Nuada Necht husband of the 
Boyne, and the Silurians worshipped the god under 
the name of Nodens or Nudens, in a temple of 
Roman make at Lydney, on the western bank of the 
Severn. To the same class belongs Mog-Neid or 
Mog-Net, Net's-Slave, in which the name oi Net was, 
according to Cormac, that of a god of war of the 
pagan Goidels. More correctly speaking, he seems to 
have been a war- god of the non-Celtic race in both 
Ireland and Britain ; for an inscription in the county 

^ See page 73 of this volume, and compare Semitic ii^mes 
like Abdiel and the like, 



266 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

of Kerry gives the name without a case-ending, and 
so marks it out as a probably non-Celtic word : it 
is worthy of notice that the mean's name Mog-Net, 
appears in the eighth century among the Transmon- 
tane Picts of Alban as evidence that the amalgamation 
of the same races had begun there also. It occurs 
reduced to Moneit in one of the chronicles as the 
name of the father of Biceot, one of the officers of 
Nechtan when he was defeated by Ungust in 729 near 
the waters of the Spey. The Kerry monum.ent^ to 
which we allude introduces us to another remarkable 
class of names, for it is found to commemorate a man 
called Net's-Hound son of Ri's-Hound. The latter 
is probably to be distinguished from R6i in Irish 
literature, in the name of a well-known legendary 
hero, called Cu-R6i mac Dairi, or Daire's son Hound 
of Rdi. Ri was possibly the name of one of the 
gods of the non-Celtic race of the Ivernians or Erna 
of Munster, as was also most likely Corb, whence 
buch names of men as Mog-Corb, Corb's-Slave, and 
Cii-Corb, Corb's-Hound, were derived. Plenty more 
of this dog nomenclature could be produced from 
Irish literature, such as Cu-Ulad, the Hound of the 
Ultonians, where we take hound to mean Guardian or 
Champion ; and so in other cases. Macbeth is also 
possibly a name of the same class. It was current in 
Ireland as well as in Scotland, and was som.etimes 



' See Brash's " Ogam Monument," p. 175, and plate xvi. ; 
the reading is Conu Nett moqvi Conu Ri : compare also the 
Hebrew Cakb^ dog, 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 267 

treated as purely Goidelic, meaning Son of Life^ ; but 
such an abstract interpretation is discountenanced by 
Madbeth^ which was Hkewise used in both islands, 
and must have meant the Slave of Beth. That this 
last word meant some dog divinity or dog-totem, 
IS suggested by the probable identity of Macbeth 
— not of Duncan, as we think — with the Hundason, 
or Hound's-Son, of one of the Orkney Sagas 
which relate to their time. In that case Maelbeth 
would be a partial translation into Gaelic of the 
name, which, completely rendered into it, produced 
the Maelchofv'' we have more than once mentioned in 
connection with the Pictish kings ; this at any rate, 
meant the Hound's Slave. Similarly Macbeth, put 
wholly into Goidelic, would be Mac-Con, or the 
Hound's Son, which occurs as the name of a legendary 
prince, whose sway was not confined to Ireland, but 
extended, according to Cormac, to the part of Britain 
in which Glastonbury stood. Mac-Con may, perhaps, 
be regarded as representing the whole non-Celtic 
race of these islands. It would occupy too much space 
to go into the details of this question, but enough has 
been said to make it probable that the dog was a most 
highly respected totem or god of that race, and also 

^ It is right, however, to say that this interpretation is counte- 
nanced by the fact that it is matched in Irish by a '* Son of 
death." 

^ The nominative would be Mael-Con, and the full genitive 
might be expected to be Maile-Chon ; but, as in certam other 
instances of the same kind, we have never met with the longer 
form, except in Bede's Hist. iii. 4, where it i>s written Meilochon 
jn three syllables, 



268 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

to call to mind the words of Herodotus, who would 
seem to have heard of such a people when he speaks 
of a race called the Kynesii or Kynetes ; both of these 
terms have a look of Greek words meaning dog-men. 
His first mention of them comes in the second book 
(c. 33), where he speaks thus : — "The Celts are out- 
side the Pillars of Hercules, and they border on the 
Kynesii, who dwell the farthest away towards the west 
of the inhabitants of Europe." The other passage 
occurs m the fourth book (c. 49), where he speaks in 
the same way, mentioning the Celts as the farthest 
away towards the setting of the sun, with the exception 
of the Kynetes. So far as the words of Herodotus 
go, one might suppose that the race he had in view 
was a non-Celtic one of Britain and Ireland ; but 
later writers, such as Avienus, locate them in the west 
of the Spanish peninsula, which suggests a still more 
important inference — namely, that there existed in 
Herodotus's time a Continental people of the same 
origin and habits as the non-Celtic aborigines of these 
islands. What the name of the latter was in this 
country we are not quiie sure, but in Ireland it was 
Ivernii in Ptolemy's time ; and he mentions a town 
there called Ivernis, and a river lernos. To these 
may be added various forms of the name of the 
island, such3is]uvena.Vs/imerna, for which the Romans 
more usually substituted Hibernia ; the Iverna of a 
graffito to be seen till lately in the Palace of the Caesars 
in Rome; the Irish Heriu or Eriii^ accusative Her inn 
or Ermn ; and the Welsh ]we7'ddon ; not to men- 
tion 'te'pj'??, mulcted of its v or w by Greek pro* 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 269 

nunciation, just as in Irish itself an early Iverijo has 
yielded Heriu^ while the name of the Ivei^nii appears 
as Ier7ii} E^iii^ and Erna in Irish literature, which 
musters that people latest and strongest in Munster.^ 
It may be added that the fact of our having the same 
word as the Goidehc name of Ireland used also as that 
of the river Earn^ in Scotland, suggests that pne would, 
perhaps, not err greatly in applying the term Ivernii^ 
or Ivernian, to the non-Celtic natives of Britain as 
well as of the sister island, where their eponymous 
ancestor of cognate name was called ler, lar, Er, 
Ir. He is eclipsed by Emer ; and the legend makes 
the whole Irish people"^ descend from two brothers, of 
whom Emer was the one, and much to their credit 
Airem (genitive Airemon) the other, whose name 
means a ploughman \ for he represented the Aryan 
farmer who introduced agriculture, however rude, 
among a people of hunters or shepherds, and he is, 
moreover, described as the first in Ireland, except the 
Fairies, to yoke cattle for work. This is in harmony 
with what is stated in the old Irish Laws, that in Erin 
all law emanated from the Feini or the waggon-men, 

^ This important form is to be inferred from icr dieruaib (Tver 
de Iverniis), in " Lebar na h-Uidre," p. 99a. 

^ Loch Erne derives its name from another source, namely 
from the ancient people called by Ptolemy 'Kp^jfot, accented 
'Ep^ti'oi in Midler's text, though most of the MSS. seem to read 
'Ep^ivoi. 

^ See Berchan's prophecy in Skene's " Chr. of the Picts and 
Scots," pp. 84, 88, 98 ; also a confused bit of geography cited 
in Reeves's ''Culdees," p. 124, where sraith hircnd must refer 
to Strathearn. 

"^ See Fiacc's Hymn in Stoke's " Goidelica,"pp. 127, 131. 



270 CELTIC BRITAIN* 

whence it was sometimes called Feineachus.'^ As the 
Celt was destined to have the upper hand over the 
Ivernian, the legend makes Airem slay Emer, and 
seize on the southern half of the island, which was 
supposed to have been the latter's kingdom ; but the 
two races agreed in being warlike, so the two brothers 
are described as the sons of a soldier or warrior, 
whom the legend therefore calls Mil in Irish, and 
Miles in Latin, whence the so-called Milesian 
Irish. This soldier sometimes had his own name, 
Galaifp- or Golain^ meaning likewise a warrior or a 
brave man, from the word gal^ passion, violence, 
valour, of the same origin as Galli, the alternative 
designation of the Continental Celts, the meaning of 
which we have suggested at p. 2 above. But the 
simple division of Ireland between the two ancestors 
of the Irish proved insufficient for the legend-mongers, 
since there were descendants of Emer and Ir in the 
north as well as in the south : the legend became com- 
plicated with an Emer son of Mi!, and an Emer son 
of Er or Ir : the latter was to be the father of the 
northern Ivernians. These last partly succumbed to 
Goidcls from Meath, represented eventually by the 
northern O'Neils, and they partly retreated as already 
mentioned (pp. 94, 246) beyond the Bann to what 
was afterwards known as the country of the Irish 
Picts or the Scotti proper : there they lesisted 
the advance of the Goidels, though some of them 

' See the " Senchus Mor," i. pp. 52, 116. 
2 See O'Curry's " MS. Materials of Ancient Irish History/' 
p. 447, and the Book of Leinster, fol. 4a. 



THE ETHNOLOGV OF BRITAIN. 2^1 

eventually found it necessary to seek a permanent 
home in Britain, namely in Argyle. Next to Munster 
this land of Dalriada, Dalnaraide, and Dalfiatach 
remained probably the most thoroughly Ivernian 
and the least Celtic in the island. It was found 
necessary to expand the story about Mil in another 
direction by giving him an uncle to bear the name 
of Ith and account for several places in Ireland called 
Mag-Ithe or the plain of Ith. This was probably non- 
Celtic, and it entered into the name of the Scotch 
island of Tiree, known formerly as Tirieth and Terra 
Hith. It is most likely the same name which we 
have met in that of the Lothian town of ludeu 
mentioned by Nennius and in that of the Judic people 
of the district around St. David's (see pp. 134 and 
152 above). 

At what time the Ivernian language became extinct 
in Ireland it is impossible to discover, but in Munster 
it appears to have not long been dead when Cormac 
wrote a sort of glossary in the ninth century, and 
alluded to it as the lam or iron language ; for, owing 
to an accident of Irish phonology, both isern-^ the 
early form of the Celtic word for iron, and Ivern- 
must become iarn in the later stages of the language, 
so that Cormac , believed that in Iarn he had the 
ordinary Irish word for iron, or affected so to believe 
in order to proceed to explain that it was so called 
on account of the difficulty of seeing through it, owing 
to its darkness and the compactness of its , texture. 
He has, however, recorded two words which he re- 
garded as belonging to that language — namely, fern^ 



27^ CELTIC BRITAIN. 

anything good, and ond, a stone. But these, together 
with Net, Corb, Ri, and similar vocables, which may 
be suspected of being Ivernian, have hitherto thrown 
no Ught on the origin of the language. Should it 
turn out that the historians, who without hesitation 
call our Ivernians Iberians, and bring them into 
relationship with the Basque-speaking people of 
France and Spain, are right in doing so, one could 
scarcely wonder that Cormac considered Ivernian a 
dark speech. In the north of Ireland that idiom may 
have been extinct in the time of Adamnan ; and 
Columba in the sixth century cannot have known it, 
which, nevertheless, does not prove that there were 
no peasants who spoke it there in his time. How- 
ever that may be, Adamnan mentions a name into 
which o?id^ a stone, possibly enters — to wit, that of 
Ondemone, a place where the Irish Picts were beaten 
by the Goidels in the year 563 : it seems to have 
been near the Bann, between Loch Neagh and the 
mouth of that river. As for Britain, one of the 
most thoroughly non-Celtic portions of it south of 
the Clyde was probably that of the Selgovse or 
hunters in Roman times, and later the more limited 
Pictish district beyond the Nith, but there is nothing 
to prove that the inhabitants had retained their non- 
Celtic tongue down to the sixth century, or that 
they had lost it before the Roman occupation. North 
of the Firths it is otherwise, as we have indications 
in Adamnan's Life of Columba that the language of 
the aborigines was still a living tongue. Adamnan 
wrote a little before the close of the seventh century, 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 273 

and his work has come down to us in a manuscript 
of the eighth. Now Columba, about whom he wrote, 
came from the north of Ireland, and spoke the 
Goidelic language : he passed over to the new settle- 
ment of the Dalriad Scots in Cantyre in 563, when 
he was forty-two years of age. Shortly afterwards he 
had the island of lona given him, where he estab- 
lished his religious house, over which Adamnan pre- 
sided in a later age. Not long after Columba 
came over to Britain he crossed Drumalban on 
a mission to Brude, king of the Picts, who had his 
stronghold in the neighbourhood of the river Ness, 
not far, probably, from its mouth. To him and his men 
Columba appears to have had no difficulty in making 
himself understood. But when, as we are told, he was 
in the province of the Picts, probably a little later but 
in much the same district, we read of him preaching 
to peasants or plebeians by interpreter. At another 
time he happened to be in the island of Skye, when 
a boat arrived with two young men who brought their 
aged father to be baptized by Columba. This time 
also he preached by an interpreter, though the convert 
bore the Celtic name of Artbranan, and is described 
as the chief of the Geonians (better perhaps Gen- 
unians), called by Adamnan Geona Cohors, in which 
we have possibly the name of a people of the main- 
land, called Cerones in the manuscripts of Ptolemy's 
Geography. They had their representative among the 
seven legendary sons of Cruithne in that one of them 
called Ce. The use here made of the word cohors 
lias already been noticed (p. 91) as a rendering of the 

T 



274 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

Goidelic word ddl^ which is proved to have been 
applied by the Goidels to the people of that region by 
the term Dalar, which it suggested to the Norsemen 
as a name for the Western Highlands : it has been 
the custom of historians to try to derive it from the 
Dalriads of Cantyre. The question now arises as 
to what was the language of the people whom 
Columba could only address by an interpreter. There 
were in north Britain two groups of Celtic dialects, 
the Goidelic and the Brythonic ; but there is no 
reason to suppose that the peasants near King Brude's 
palace were Brythons, and still less probable is it that 
those who visited Columba in Skye were of that race. 
It has usually been supposed that they merely differed 
from the missionary Scot in speaking a Goidelic 
dialect, which was not his ; but such a view does 
scant justice to the devotion of the early saints of 
Ireland to their work, and there is no reason whatever 
to suppose that they could not speedily master dia- 
lectal differences, which were at most of no very 
important nature in that early age. So far from this 
b^ing the case, the usual silence as to interpreters 
suggests that it was not a rare thing for Goidels to 
master the language of the Brythons, and the latter that 
of the former, so far as to be able to make their way 
in one another's country, though it must have given 
them infinitely more trouble than any dialect closely 
akin to their own. It remains, then, that the 
language of the people who could not understand 
Columba was not Celtic : in all probability it was that 
of the ancient inhabitants. In the district in which 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 275 

the power of the Picts grew into a considerable state, 
where the remarkable succession, known as Pictish, 
obtained and lasted longest, it appears that Goidelic 
was unintelligible to the peasants in the sixth cen- 
tury, while in the west, opposite Skye, even men of 
rank among the Picts could be found who knew 
no Goidelic, though they had begun to adopt Goidelic 
names, just as, in Wales, many a man has the English 
name John Jones, though he cannot speak English 
or pronounce his name in the English way. Here 
may also be mentioned Argyle, as it is found variously 
called Oirir Gaithel, Airer Gaethel, and Arregaethel, 
meaning the region belonging to the Goidels or 
Gaelic -speaking people, just as Airer Dalriatai 
meant the country of the Dalriads : to give the 
word Argyle its full meaning, it must be supposed 
that, at the time it came into use, the Picts to the north 
of the district properly so called were as yet not 
Goidels : that is to say, that they still had a language ot 
their own. Bede enumerates ^ the peoples of Britain, 
in whose languages Christianity was taught in his 
day, as being the Angles, the Brythons, the Scotti 
(that is to say, the Goidels), the Picts, and the Latins. 
,But so far as regards the Pictish language, the sig- 
nificance of his words is sometimes explained away 
by supposing it to have been a Celtic dialect lying 
somewhere between Brythonic and Goidelic, but 
rather nearer the latter. There is, however, no reason 
to suppose that to have been Bede's view ; for in the 
case of English, he was content to let the language of 

1 " Hist. Eccl.," i. I. 

T 2 



276 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

the Angles stand for all the dialects without mention- 
ing here, for instance, that of the Saxons. For a long 
time, probably before Pictish or Ivernian wholly died 
out, it was loaded with words borrowed from Celtic ; 
but there is no ground whatever to suppose that it other- 
wise resembled Celtic or any other Aryan tongue ; 
and if what we have surmised as to the name Macbeth 
should prove well founded, it would tend to show 
that the non-Celtic speech did not become completely 
extinct till the restoration for a time, in the eleventh 
century, of the Pictish kingdom, in the person 
of the king of that name. The subject cannot be 
here gone into at length, but we may say that there 
are data which tend to prove that the non-Celtic abori- 
gines spoke what was practically one and the same 
language in both Britain and Ireland. Moreover, we 
are inclined to believe that it has left its influence on 
Goidelic, and it may be presumed, that where the 
ancient inhabitants were unable to hold their own, 
they were not extirpated by the Goidels but gradually 
assimilated by them. At first the Goidel probably 
drove the Ivernian back towards the west and 
the north, but, when another invasion came, that 
of the Brythons, he was driven back in the same 
way ; that is, he was, forced, so to say, into the 
arms of the Ivernian native, to make common 
cause with him against the common enemy. Then 
followed the amalgamation of the Goidelic and 
Ivernian elements ; for wherever traces of the latter 
are found we seem to come upon the native in the 
process of making himself a Goidel, and before 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. ^77 

becoming Welsh or English in speech he first became 
Goidelic, in every instance south of the Clyde. This 
means, from the Celtic point of view, that the Goidelic 
race of history is not wholly Celtic or Aryan, but that 
it inherits in part a claim to the soil of these islands, 
derived from possession at a time when, as yet, no 
Aryan Avaggoner's team had approached the Atlantic ; 
and it is, perhaps, from their Kynesian ancestry that 
the Irish of the present day have inherited the lively 
humour and ready wit, which, among other character- 
istics, distinguish them from the Celts of the Brythonic 
brar^ch, most of whom, especially the Kymry, are a 
people still more mixed, as they consist of the Goidelic 
element of the compound nature already suggested, 
with an ample mixture of Brythonic blood, introduced 
mostly by the Ordovices. As for Welsh, in Wales, 
it is, roughly speaking, the Brythonic language as 
spoken by the Ordovices, and as learned by the 
Goidelic peoples overshadowed by them in the Princi- 
pality. This harmonizes with the actual distribution 
of the four chief dialects of spoken Welsh, which 
are those respectively of the Ordovic land of Powys, 
of Siluria or Gwent, of Demetia or Dyved, and of 
Venedot or Gwynedd. 

Skulls are harder than consonants, and races lurk 
behind when languages slink away. The lineal des- 
cendants of the neolithic aborigines are ever among 
us, possibly even those of a still earlier race. On the 
other hand, we can imagine the Kynesian impatiently 
hearing out the last echoes of palaeolithic speech ; we 
can guess dimly how the Goidel gradually silenced the 



27S CteLTiC BklTAiN. 

Kynesian; we can detect the former coming slowly 
round to the keynote of the Brython ; and, lastly, we 
know how the Englishman is engaged, linguistically 
speaking, in drowning the voice of both in our own 
day. This intrusion upon intrusion of one race on 
another renders it very hard to treat intelligibly of 
such a people, for example, as the Welsh, at any 
rate without repeatedly making the wearisome round 
of circumlocution ; thus, one may happen to be 
dealing with them chiefly in an anthropological sense 
as Brythons, and as distinguished from Goidels, 
while one may be understood to be looking ethno- 
logically at them as forming certain well - known 
linguistic or political aggregates, which, in point of 
race, consist of mixed groups of Brythons, Goidels, 
and non-Aryans. We are not sanguine enough to 
suppose that the possibility of misunderstandings of 
the nature here indicated has been successfully 
avoided in these pages. All we can reasonably 
expect the reader's mind to retain, is a certain 
impression of a somewhat confused picture of one 
wave of speech chasing another and forcing it to 
dash itself into oblivion on 'the western confines 
of the Aryan world. That we should fondly dream 
English likely to be the last^ comes only from our 
being unable to see into a distant future pregnant 
with untold changes of no less grave a nature than 
those which have taken place in the dreary wastes of 
the past. 



279 



APPENDIX. 



NOTES ON SOME OF THE NAMES IN THE 

TEXT. 

A09EDOMAROS, p. 36. The second part of this 
name, ?ndros, is supposed to be the same word as the 
Welsh mawr, great, large, Irish^;;?^;' or mor, and it 
enters into a great many Celtic names. With regard 
to the other part, it is first to be observed that some 
of the Gallo-Brythonic Celts of antiquity lisped their 
ss in certain positions into 'SS or dB ; but this habit 
was neither general nor has it come down into Welsh. 
The genitive of A^^edomaros is read Assedomari in 
an inscription found in Styria (Berlin " Corpus Inscr. 
Lat.," iii. No. 5,291); and a Welsh name, partly 
identical, is met with in a Welsh MS. of the twelfth 
century as Guymiassed (see Skene's '^ Four Ancient 
Books of Wales," ii. p. 32), which would now be 
written Gwynasedd. But the number of Welsh words 
that should throw light on the meaning of asedd is 
somewhat embarrassing ; first comes asen^ a rib, plural 
eis, ribs, also the roof beams which run the length of 
a house ; then we have an asedd, which would, at first 
sight, seem to be the word wanted, but is probably a 
collective plural of as-en, standing for an earlier ansiia; 
lastly may be mentioned aseth^ which may be a variant 
of the same word as assedo : it means a spit or spear. 
Thus A^'^edomaros would appear to mean one who is 



2^0 Celtic Britain. 

great as to the spear, and Gwynasedd would be, so to 
speak, Whitespear. The related forms are Gothic 
a?is^ a beam, O. Norse dss^ a pole, a main rafter, a 
yard \ also probably the Latin asser, a beam, pole, or 
stake. It would thus appear that aSS and ass in the 
name in question stand for an earlier ans^ and this 
has an important bearing on the interpretation of 
other old names. A different theory has been pro- 
posed by the learned professor, ^M. d'Arbois de 
Jubainville, in his work, entitled " Etudes Grammati- 
cales," pp. 32*-38.* 

Adminius, p. 34. The form Amminns^ which is 
the one on coins, shows that Adminius is a Latinizing 
of Amminios under the influence of the notion that 
the name began with the prefix ad. 

Alauna, p 161. We have possibly the same name 
in the Welsh Alun, borne by a stream that joins the 
Dee not far from Chester, and there is a Coed Alun 
near Carnarvon. 

Allobfox, p. 140. Allobrox, pi. Allobroges, appears 
in that form as the name of a Celtic people in Gaul. 
It is likewise read Allobrogae, a word thus explained 
by an ancient scholiast on Juvenal, viii. 233 : — "Allo- 
brogae Galli sunt. Ideo autem dicti Allobrogae quo- 
niam brogae Galli agrum dicunt, alia autem aliud ; dicti 
autem Allobroges quia ex alio loco fuerant translati " 
(see Jahn's "Juvenal," p. 303, and Diefenbach's 
" Grig. Europ.," s. v. Allobrogae). So the alio- of 
this name goes with the Greek aAXo-, as against the 
Latin aliu-s ; for the Gallo-Brythonic Celts agreed 
v/ith the Greeks in making // into //. Brox^ broges, 
and brogae are represented in Welsh by bro, a 
district or country. The Irish form inruig, more 
frequently bruig, has been ascertained to be the 
same word as the English march, and German 
mark, a boundary or district. Probably the Latin 



NOTES. 281 

margo, edge or boundary, is from the same source. 
The old Gaulish had made mr into br, as Welsh has 
in bro, which enters also into the Welsh word Cymro^ 
a Welshman, pi. Cymry, for Com-brox and Com-brogii 
respectively. The vowel of the second part varied m 
Welsh as in ti'oed^ foot, traed^ feet, since the Welsh 
word for a Welshwoman is Cymraes, and for the 
Welsh language CyfJtraeg, implying early forms, Com- 
bragissa and Combragica. The national name, Cymro 
seems to have been confined to the Kymric Celts, 
though the Bretons sometimes give the simple bro 
the sense of compatriot ; and, whether the Kymry 
have ethnologically anything to do with the Cimbri or 
not, the names have absolutely nothing in common, in 
spite of what charlatans continue to say to the contrary. 

Ante^rigus, p. 37. The coins give Antedrigus, 
Anted, and other abbreviations ; so I have ventured 
to regard the name as Ante^rigiLS of the U declen- 
sion : the meaning of the compound is obscure. 

Atecotti, pp. 56, 91, 222. This seems to be the 
most correct spelling of the word, as it is probably to 
be resolved into Ate-cotti, the latter element being 
practically identical with the Cornish word coth, 
Breton coz^ old or ancient. Ate is the early form of 
the prefix which appears in modern Welsh as ad, at, 
in such words as adgas or afcas, odious, from cas, 
hateful. With Atecotti as meaning ancient inhabi- 
tants, compare the Irish Tiiath Sen-Chenebil and 
Tuath Sen-Era7tn, the tribe of the Old Race, and 
the tribe of the Old Ivernians respectively, in the 
lists of Irish tribes in O'Curry's " Manners and 
Customs of the Ancient Irish," vol. i. pp. xxviii., &c. 

Atrebates, p. 10. It is also treated as Atrebatii, 
which has been resolved into Ad-treb~at-, and derived 
from ad-treb, whence the Irish verb attrebaim, " I 
dwell or inhabit," and the Welsh athref m the term 



262 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

« 

tir athref^ whereby was meant the land immediately 
around the dwelling. Thus it appears that Atrehates 
meant inhabitants, but probably in the special sense 
of farmers or homestead men. It may be added that 
the Welsh word tref has its equivalents in the English 
thorps German doj'f^ and their congeners. 

Belisama, p. 68. The meaning of the name is 
unknown, bat in point of fortn the word seems to be 
a superlative Hke Uxania : this occurs in the name ot 
a Gaulish town in Spain called by Ptolemy Uxatna 
Barca, which would in Welsh be Barca Uchaf or 
Upper Barca, literally, in accordance with Celtic 
idiom. Uppermost Barca. Possibly Auximiim (now 
Osimo), a town of the Piceni, may be compared. 

BiTURix, p. 65. The plural was Bituriges, and the 
name of the people is now perpetuated by the town 
of Bourges : it seems to have meant Welthei'rscher or 
world-kings, bitu being the same word which we have 
in the Welsh byd, world, Irish, bith, gen. betho. 

Blatobulgion, p. 253. This is a curious name, 
and the following notes may be of interest: — The 
story of Branwen, daughter of Llyr, describes Bran, 
her brother, leading a host to Ireland and on the 
point of being received into a spacious palace by the 
Irish, when one of his brothers, having gone before, found 
that they had two hundred bags in different parts of 
the building containing each a warrior ready for 
battle : he asked the Irish what was in each bag 
{bol)^ and they persistently replied that it was meal 
{blawd). He went round, and quietly killed all the 
soldiers in the bags by squeezing each man's skull 
between his fingers : then he sang an englyn on the 
kind of meal he found in the last of the bags 
(" Mab.," iii. pp. 95, 96; 120, 121). On the Irish 
side we have the account of the battle of Dunbolg^ in 
Wicklow, published by O'Donovan in his edition of 



NOTES. 283 

the "Four Masters" under the year 594, when, 
according to some, it took place. This story makes 
a provincial Irish king, Bran Dub, conquer the King 
of Erin by passing in the night into the latter's 
camp with a large number of wild horses and some 
thousands of oxen bearing hampers on their backs. 
The hampers were supposed by the sentinels to be 
full of food for the King of Erin, but they contained 
armed men, who presently attacked the camp, and 
tied small bags full of stones to the tails of the wild 
horses to increase the confusion. The result was the 
utter defeat of Bran's enemies, and that the place 
came to be called the fort of sacks or Dun-bolg. 
Treated as Celtic, Blatobtdgion must have literally 
meant the Meal-bag, and it consists of early forms of 
the words cited from the Mabinogi of Branwen. It 
is, however, possible that bulgion, bolg, and hoi in all 
the foregoing instances are not words of Celtic origin, 
and that they had another meaning. The name in 
the Itinerary used to be treated as two words ; but it 
occurs only once — namely, in the ablative case — and 
we have no hesitation in reading Blatobulgio instead 
of the unintelligible Blato Bulgio of the editors. 
This is another happy suggestion for which we are 
indebted to Dr. Henry Bradley. Another Blatobul- 
gion has been identified in the neighbourhood of 
St. Andrews : it is now Bkbo, representing older 
forms Blabo, Blabolg, Bladebolg, Blathbolg. For this 
I am indebted to Mr. W. J. N. Liddall, who has 
pubhshed it in his "Place-names of Fife and 
Kinross" (Edinburgh, 1896), p. 10. 

BoRESTi, pp. 89, 95. It is difficult not to regard 
the first two syllables of this name as the Brythonic 
equivalent of the word forest, which comes to us from 
the Low Latin foresta. The Boresti were very pro- 
bably the same people as the Verturiones ; and in 



284 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

that case they formed the outlying portion of the 
nation of the Brythons, and dwelt on the outskirts of 
the Caledonian Forest. 

BouDiccA, p. 66. This or Bodicca is doubtless the^ 
most correct form, with the c doubled for a dim- 
inutival name : the ordinary Boadicea is the gibberish 
of editors. The name occurs as Bodicca in a Roman 
inscription found in Africa (Berlin, "Corpus Inscr. 
Lat." viii. No. 2877), and Bodiccius is read in an 
inscription commemorating a man belonging to a 
cohort of Bfittones in Pannonia (iii. No. 3256). But 
Boudica or Boudicas is the spelling in a Roman 
inscription found in Spain (ii. No. 455), and the 
name Budic was not an unusual one formerly in 
Brittany. It is commonly supposed that they are 
all of the same origin as the Welsh word budd^ 
benefit, advantage, and buddugol, victorious, so that 
Boudicca might perhaps be equated in point of 
meaning with such a Latin name as Victori7ia. 

Brigantes, pp. 30, 39, 113. Some would have it 
that this name meant mountaineers or hill-men from 
the same origin as the Welsh bre^ a hill, and bryn^ the 
same. But there are other words which seem to offer 
a better explanation, such as Welsh bri^ renown, 
eminence, braint, privilege, formerly written bryeint 
for brigeint-, representing an early brigantia or brigajt- 
tion according as the word was fem. or neuter. From 
the stem brigant- was formed an adjective brigant-in-^ 
which was reduced in Cornish to brentyn or bryntyn : 
it meant noble, free, privileged, the contrary of keth^ 
enslaved, while in Welsh it became breenhin, now 
brenhm, a king, which has nothing to do with 
Brennus, though old-fashioned philologists still fancy 
it has. Phonologically brigant- in all these words is 
the Gallo-Brythonic form of a common Celtic brignt- 
which, with the nasal regularly suppressed, we have in 



NOTES. 285 

the Irish name Brigit (for Brignti of the i declen- 
sion), St. Bridget or Bride. On the whole, then, 
Brigantes would seem to have meant the free men or 
privileged race as contrasted with some other people. 
Caledones or Calidones, pp. 165, 232. The 
nominative singular has been discovered as Caledo 
on a bronze tablet found a few years ago at Colchester : 
see " The Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries," 
Series II., vol. xiv., p. 108; also "The Proc. of 
the Soc. of Antiq. of Scotland," xxxii. 326-30, and 
*' Tne Welsh People," p. 46. The reading of this 
very important find is (subject to the correction of 
si into stri) : — 

DEO • MARTI . MEDOCIO • CAMP 
ESIVM [sic] . ET VICTORIE ALEXAN 
DRI • PII FELICIS AVGVSTI ■ NOSI [sic] 
DONVM . LOSSIO • VEDA • DE • SVO 
POSVIT . NEPOS ■ VEPOGENI • CALEDO. 

Caledo is probably of Pictish origin, and its meaning 
is unknown : the Celtic etymologies usually proposed 
for it will not bear examination. Probably the 1; in 
Ptolemy's \\a\r]l6vioi did not mean a long vowel : at 
any rate no such quantity is countenanced by the 
forms extant in Celtic, whether Gaelic or Welsh. 
This brings us to Caledonia^ which was presumably a 
word hke Britannia, made by the Romans from the 
national name Caledo. The latter probably yielded 
in Goidelic a genitive Caledijtas, whence Caildenn 
in Dunchailden or Dunkeld, and in early Brythonic 
a corresponding Calidonos, now Celyddon as in Coed 
Celyddon^ the Caledonian Forest. 

Calgacos, p. 89. This seems a preferable spelling 
to Galgacos, as the word, if perchance Celtic, may be 
derived from the same origin as the Irish word colg or 
calg^ a sword ; but another etymology is suggested by 
the Irish word celg^ cunning, treachery : compare the 



286 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

name of the Irish hero called Celtchar na Celg or 
C. of the Wiles, in an Irish poem to be found in 
Windisch's " Irische Texte," p. 215. 

Calleva, pp. 24, 29. This possibly meant a town 
in the wood, and is to be explained by means of the 
Welsh collective cell-i, a wood, a copse : the simpler 
form cell meant a grove as in cell ysgaiv^ a grove of 
elder, but it has been ousted by and confounded with 
the other cell, which is the Latin cella : the Irish word 
was caill, a wood. If this guess be right, it would 
suggest that the first syllable of the present name 
Silchester stands for the Latin word silva. 

Camulodunon, p. 26. The locative occurs on 
coins as Camuloduno. Dunon is the word which 
makes din, a fortress or town in Welsh, and the whole 
name seems to have meant the town of Camulos, who 
appears as one of the gods of the Gauls. His name 
also seems to enter into the proper name Camelorigi 
on an early inscribed stone in Pembrokeshire, and 
Camuloris on a lead coffin found in Anglesey : see 
" Lect. on Welsh Phil.," pp. 364, 400. 

Caratacos, p. 35. The Romans wrote Caratacus, 
and the editors have made it into Caractacus, which 
is gibberish. The abbreviations carat and cara 
have been found on coins : see Sir J. Evans's '* Addi- 
tional coins of the Ancient Britons," pp. 252-5, pi. xii. 
XX. The name is well-known in Mod. Welsh as 
Caradog, and in Irish as Carlhach, genitive Carthaig, 
perpetuated in an Anglicized form by the Irish 
families that call themselves McCarthy. 

Carausius, pp. 93, 240. The name probably 
became popular in Britain : at any rate we find it on 
an early inscribed stone at Penmachno, near Bettws 
y Coed. Etymologically speaking, we are tempted 
to identify it with the Irish Cu-R6i, which seems to 
have meant " the Hound of the Plain or of the Field, 



NOTES. 287 

probably the field of battle,' from the Irish ifeminine 
rbe^ rot, ' a level plain,' of the same origin as Latin 
rus, riiris, ' the country." The early Celtic base 
would accordingly be rovesia (Stokes's " Urkeltischer 
Sprachschatz," p. 235), and the name Cii-Roi would 
represent Kuo-rovesiais or Kuo-rovesi-es, of which 
Ca-rausi-us would seem to be an adaptation with the 
unaccented ktw shortened into cu or co. The further 
change from unaccented co to cd is detected in Latin 
in the case of Cofiovmm, ' Conway,' which has been 
found (in the ablative) as Ka?iovio on a Roman mile- 
stone : see Holder s.v. 

Carbantorigon, p. 233. This may be taken to 
be a somewhat fuller spelling of Carbantorion, 
much in the same way as we have had Bergyon for 
Iberion. The Geographer of Ravenna writes simply 
Carbantiuni. 

Cartismandua, p. 39. It is also found written 
Cartimandua, and the second element seems to be 
the same as the first part of the name Mandiibratios, 
and we have it in such Gaulish ones as Viromandui 
and Epojnanduoduron. 

Cassi, pp. 17, 28. Supposing the ss to stand here 
for an earlier ns^ the name might be taken to be 
connected with the Gothic hansa, a band or host, 
German hanse, a league, whence the name of the 
Hanse Towns. The word Cassi in that case appears 
to have meant allies or confederates : see Veneti. 
The tribal idea of a common ancestor had perhaps 
given, or been giving, way to the more purely political 
one of alliance and mutual defence : see also Catti^ 
and A^^edomaros. 

Cassiterides, p. 204. M. Salomon Reinach infers 
that, as the Greeks derived their word for copper 
from the Greek name of Cyprus, and similarly in 
the -case of several others of their names of metals, 



288 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

KciaairepoQ ' tin ' comes from a national name under- 
lying Cassiterides. Does Celtic literature supply any 
clue to that name ? We are inclined to think that it 
does — to wit, in the feminine noun Cessair, genitive 
Cesra^ which occurs in Irish legend, and as to which 
one may say that Irish phonology permits our sup- 
posing the early form of the nominative to have been 
Cassitari-s, later Cestari-s^ Cessair : so much as to the 
form. Ireland is sometimes found called Cessair's 
Island (Curry's " Courtship of Momera," p. 155), and 
a story occurs which represents Cessair and her 
followers landing in the south-west of Ireland shortly 
before the Flood. So she may be inferred to have 
been an early ancestress or eponymous goddess of a 
pre-Celtic population there ; but we want a people 
bearing her name in common in Ireland and Britain, 
or, at any rate, in the southern portions of both 
islands. In other words, we want a story which 
brings Cessair nearer to South Britain, and such a 
one offers itself in the Book of Leinster, fo. 21^, 22^ 
It is to the effect that the early Goidelic king Ugaine 
the Great had twenty-five sons and daughters, whose 
names turn out to be no other than the names of 
plains and districts, of which nearly one-half belong 
to Leinster and most of the rest to Connaught and 
Munster. Now the name of the mother of Ugaine's 
children is given as Cessair, which confirms the con- 
jecture that she represents the pre-Celtic populations 
of Ireland, with whom the Celtic element was be- 
ginning to amalgamate in Ugaine's time. Thus it is 
but natural to suppose the pre-Celts to have originally 
reached Ireland from the nearest shores of Britain, 
and for a considerable time subsequently to have 
owned the same national name in the colony and the 
mother country. Now it is to such a period some- 
where in the second millenniurn l^efpre the Christian 



NOTES. 289 

era that we should refer KaaairEpoc. We offer this 
as a mere conjecture supplementary of the view 
advocated by M. Reinach. See his paper in " L'An- 
thropologie" for 1892, pp. 275-81, Rhys's letter con- 
cerning it in The Academy, Oct, 5, 1895, ^^^o "The 
Welsh People/' pp. 59-61. 

Cassivellaunos, pp. 15, 248. The reading adopted 
by the best editors of the Latin texts in which the 
name occurs is Cassivellaunus, but we are not sure 
that the // is any more warranted here than in Uxelo- 
dunon, to be mentioned later. The whole name 
would seem, in accordance with what has already 
been guessed with regard to Cassi, to mean a ruler of 
the league or a tribe-king ; for Vellaunos probably 
meant a prince or one who reigned, the root being 
the same as that of the Welsh gwlad, Irish flaith 
(pp. 67, 138), English, wield^ German, ivalte7i^ to 
rule, and probably also that of the Latin valere, to be 
strong. The epigraphic instances in point are the 
following: — (i.) Vellavnivs in an inscription at 
Caerleon (Berlin "Corpus Insc. Lat." vii. No. 126). 
(2.) Catvallavna, describing the nationality of a 
woman married to a Palmyrene husband and buried 
at South Shields (" Ephemeris Epigraphica," iv. 
p. 212, No. 718(2): the inscription commemorating 
this Catuvellaunian lady is in somewhat rustic Latin, 
and the compound has dropped the formative vowel 
of the first element in the compound, so that Catu- 
vellauna is here read Cat-vallauna. (3.) Velavni, 
the name of an Alpine people (" Corpus Insc. Lat.," 
v. No. 7817,45). (4.) Velavnis, the nominative of a 
man's name in two inscriptions found in Spain (iii. 
Nos. 1589 ; 1590). (5.) Valamni, the genitive of a 
man's name on an Ogam-inscribed stone from the 
county of Cork, and written in Mod. Irish Follam- 
hain^ in the family name 0' Follamhain^ which 

U 



290 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

English spelling simplifies into O' Fallon. The forms 
with val for vel represent probably a somewhat 
later stage of pronunciation among the Brythons 
than the others do, and the Goidelic Valamni further 
suggests that they and the Gauls had already begun 
to soften mn into Dfi^ so that it would, perhaps, be 
more correct to write Cassivellavnos. Welsh tradition 
before the time of Geoffrey of Monmouth probably 
knew little of Cassivellaunos : his name was shaped, 
after the analogy of Cadwallon and the like, into 
Caswallon, which was then not unfrequently substi- 
tuted for the former in quasi-historical writings. 
Cadwallon, however, is most likely a name very 
differently formed, standing, as it may be supposed, 
for Catuvelioj genitive Catiivelionos : a Brythonic 
velio, velionos, would in Irish be somewhat of the 
form feliu, felemt or foliu, folami, and we have a 
derivative from it in the Irish verb follnaim, I reign. 
Besides an early Brythonic velto, there was probably 
a velatros, of the same meaning : it is postulated by 
the Welsh name Cadwaladr, Most likely all these 
names are to be kept distinct from the valos implied 
by such a name as Cadwal, identical with the German 
Hathovulf, and meaning battle- wolf, where Welsh wal 
is to be equated with the wolf so common in German 
and English proper names : this wal, in its turn, has 
derivatives in ajt, such as Buddwalait. 

Catti, p. 29. The view that Catti was the name 
of a people depends on its being identical with Cassi; 
for Catti might also be the genitive singular of a 
personal name, since we have the nominative Cattos 
on a Gaulish coin : see Cassi. 

Caturiges, p. 30. The word is made up of rlges^ 
the plural of rlx, a king, and catu, of the same origin 
as the A.-Sax. heathg-, war. In Irish it is cath, and 
in Mod. Welsh cad, where it means a battle. The 



NOTES. 



291 



name would accordingly signify battle-kings or war 
kings. 

Catuvellauni : see Cassivellaunos and Cafuriges. 

Celt^, p. 2. This word is sometimes explained 
as the equivalent of the Latin cehi, in the sense of 
tall men ; but celse nati would be a preferable inter- 
pretation. Better would be the Geraian word held^ a 
hero, and, better still, the O. Norse hild-r^ which not 
only meant war, but was also the name of one of the 
Valkyrias, regarded as the handmaids of Woden as 
god of war, while it entered into many proper names 
like Hildibrandr and Bfynhildr, According to 
M. d'Arbois de Jubainville, the Norse Hild-r was 
nothing but the masculine Celta, borrowed and 
treated as a feminine : see " Les Celtes " (Paris, 
1904), p. 172. Perhaps in any case we have related 
forms in Lith. kalti^ to strike, to hammer as a smith, 
perkaltt, to strike through, Latin peixellere, to strike, 
smite, to beat down. Lastly, it is possible that the 
word should be regarded as resembling Britto7ies in 
point of meaning (see p. 213), and that we should 
connect it with the Irish word celt^ dress or raiment, 
whence the Scotch word kilt^ 

Cenimagni, pp. 17, 28. The conjecture that Ceni- 
magni stands for Ecenimagni would require, to estab- 
lish it, that one should assign the meanings of both 
parts, eceni and magni. This is unfortunately difficult 
to do; but it may be supposed that ece?i- is to be 
equated with the Welsh word egiii, which now has no 
other signification than that of sprouts or germs of a 
blade-like form, and one may surmise that it origmally 
connoted sharpness, as its etymology is probably the 
same as that of the Latin aacere, to sharpen, acies, 
edge, sharp edge, hi that case, Eceni originally 
referred to some sort of sword or knife, and the 
word 77iagni was added to particularise it ; but in 

u 2 



292 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

what sense is not evident. For magn- would prob- 
ably yield in Welsh maen^ which is perhaps to be 
identified with the Welsh word 7naen^ ' a stone.' 
Provisionally, then, the whole term would mean the 
Men of the Knives of Stone ; in that case it is clear 
that the qualifying term might frequently be dis- 
pensed with, when the people would be simply called 
Eceni. This, in fact, would be a sort of Celtic 
parallel to the name of the Saxons, supposed to be so 
called from their use of the knife they termed seax. 
A part of the Gaulish people of the Aulerci was also 
called Cenomani ; so, perhaps after all, the safest view 
to take is to consider this to be practically the same 
name as that of our Cenimagni, and the British people 
so named to have been a Belgic tribe, to whom no 
other allusion has been found. Lastly, if we treat 
Eceni as the whole name, it would probably be more 
correct to consider it to have been of the more 
derivative form Ecenii^ meaning men armed with 
blades, let us say swordsmen. 

CoGiDUMNOS, p. 79. Tacitus has Cogidwnno in 
the dative, and all that is legible of the name in 
the inscription is gidvbni for the genitive Cogidubni, 
with hn for the mii of the MSS., an interchange which 
is very common, and suggests that both mn and bn 
had already been softened into vn. 

CoMMios, p. 10. The meaning of this name is 
uncertain, but we have a simpler form of the same 
origin in the Gaulish Comus, with which the Comux 
of an old British coin is probably identical, with x 
for i", which was not very unusual : see Tincommios. 

CoNBELLiNi, p. 254. The reading of this vocable 
is now certain : it is possibly the same name as 
Cunobelinos, or rather a Goidelic derivative from it. 

CoNCANGii, p. 235. The other names with which 
this seems to range itself are Gangani and Deceangli, 



NOTES. 293 

the latter being the name which is suggested by the 
abbreviations Decea, Deceang, Decea?igl on pigs of 
lead found in Cheshire and Staffordshire : see the 
Berlin "Corp. Insc. Lat.," vii. Nos. 1,204, 1,205, 
1,206, with which compare No. 1,207 found in tiie 
country of the Brigantes, in the West Riding of 
Yorkshire : it is said to read Brig. 

CoRiTANi, pp. 30, 106. This name may have been 
derived from pre-Celtic inhabitants, who possibly 
survived in the inaccessible districts near the Wash, 
which reached formerly almost to where Cambridge 
now stands. Add to this that we are reminded 
of the Pict as far south as the Kettering district in 
Northants, where there is a place called Pytchley, 
iormtrXy Fihtes led : see Kemble's "Codex Diplom." 
443 (Ap. to vol. iii.) ; also Wilson's "Prehistoric Annals 
of Scotland," i. p. 287 : compare p. 313 below. Accord- 
ing to another reading of Ptolemy, the people's name 
was not Coritani, but Coritavi ; but it is not so well 
supported, and we give the preference to the other. 

CoRNAVii, pp. 30, 221. The Welsh com, a horn, 
was probably a U stem like the Latin corfiu, but in 
other cases the u may have been diphthongized so 
that the genitive, for instance, may have been cornov- 
os, from which an adjective was formed, making in 
the singular Cor?iovios or Cornavios, and in the 
plural Cornavii. In "Cormac's Glossary the Cornavii 
of Dumnonia" are called Bretain Cornn, or the 
Brythons of the Horns, if, indeed, the south-west 
corner of Wales be not what was meant. In an 
account of the Danes and Norsemen flocking together 
for the struggle which ended with the battle of Clon- 
tarf, some are said to have come from the Corn- 
Britons of St. David's, and allusion is there made to 
another Cor?2, which may possibly have been the 
headland between the Dee and the Mersey, which 



294 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

was in the possession of the Danes at one time. See 
Skene's " Celtic Scotland," i. p. 387. 

CuNEGLASOS, p. 12 2. This is given by Gildas in 
the vocative as Cuneglase, which he asserts to have 
meant in Latin lanio fulve, the tawny butcher. The 
element, cune^ is more usually met with as cuno or 
ama, as in Cuno-belinos and Cuna-lipi. The reason 
for the variation is that the formative vowel was even 
then but slightly pronounced : later it disappeared alto- 
gether, leaving these names in the forms Conglas and 
Cofibelin, whence later Cynlas and Cynfelyn. The 
meaning and origin of cuno are obscure ; but Gildas 
may have had in his mind the Welsh word for a dog, 
which is now ci^ plural avn, though in his time it was 
probably cu, genitive cuno{s), and what he renders 
lanio may well have meant, considering the mood he 
was in, a champion or great warrior. The corre- 
sponding Teutonic vocable was hun, the meaning of 
which is also obscure, though that of giant has been 
suggested. The following Celtic names in point have 
their exact equivalents in the list of Old German 
ones: — Cunoval-i {Wo^. Welsh, Cymval), Cunalip-i 
(which would be in Mod. Welsh Cynllib), and Cuno- 
nior-i (Mod. Welsh, Cy?ifo7^=- Hunnlf^ Htmlaif, and 
Hunmar. 

CuNOBELiNos, p. 26. This name has been in vogue 
among the Welsh, by whom it has been successively 
written Conbelin and Cynfelyn. The first element, 
amo^ is mentioned under Cuneglasos^ and the other 
seems to consist of the name of the god Belenos or 
Belinos. Continental inscriptions equate Belinos 
with Apollo ; he was worshipped by the Gauls, and 
probably also by the Brythons, though .we do not 
happen to have any votive tablets that would prove 
it. But the supposition is favoured by the fact of his 
name entering into that of Cunobelinos^ which hardly 



Notes. 295 

stands alone, as the well-known Welsh name Llyivelyn 
probably represents an early compound Lugubelinos. 

Deceangli, pp. 81, 293. The reading formerly 
adopted was i?ide Cangos, while the sense requires in 
Decemiglos^ which is suggested by the abbreviation 
Deceangl on the pigs of lead already alluded to. The 
question of the locality of this people is a very 
difficult one; but one thing which makes for the 
district between the Dee and the Clwyd, is that it 
produces lead, and bears in Welsh the name of 
Tegeingl, which shows some similarity to the name 
here in question. It would still further remove some 
of the difficulty if we could suppose the Deceangli to 
have inhabited the country on both banks of the Dee. 

DECANTiE, Decanti, pp. 226, 232. These are 
virtually, no doubt, one and the same name ; but that 
of the people from whom Deganwy was called arx 
Decantorum in the Welsh Chronicle differs slightly 
from Deganwy^ since this last appears to represent a 
related form Decantovion^ or the like. It is possible 
that Tacitus's words, already mentioned, in Decangos^ 
should be emendated into in Decantos^ which would 
bring the Roman army to the neighbourhood of the 
Conv/y. Lastly, one should compare Decanfce, Novanfce, 
and Setantiij the two former of which Mr. Nicholson 
derives respectively from the Celtic numerals for lo 
and 9, see his "Keltic Researches," pp. i8, 19. 

Deira, p. 114. The origin of the Welsh JDeivr or 
Deifr^ from which this name comes, is obscure, but 
it may be presumed to derive directly from a form 
Debria or Dobria^ and to be identical with the Welsh 
word deifr^ waters. This leads us to suppose that the 
district got its name from the many rivers that meet 
in its south-western corner ; and the reader may com- 
pare the following line in Arinbiorn's Lay : i loforvik 
urgom hiarli^ " over the wet land of York." (Vig- 



296 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

fusson ^nd Powell's "Corpus Poeticum Boreale,'M., 
pp. 272, 538.) 

Demet^, p. 81. The name is of unknown mean- 
ing ; the district is called in Modern Welsh Dyved, 
written Dyfed ; beside the personal name Dimet, in 
the Nennian Pedigrees, we have its genitive as Demeti 
in an early inscription near Haverfordwest : see 
Rhys's "Lect. on Welsh Phil.," p. 277. 

Deva, p. 68. This word originally denoted the 
river, or rather the goddess of the river, for Deva is 
only the feminine corresponding to a masculine 
devo-s, a godj but, when the old terminations were 
dropped, dhws and deva assumed the same form, and 
this, according to rule, yielded in Old Welsh doiu or 
duiu : later it was written divyw^ as in dwywol, 
divine, which is now dwyfol, of the same meaning. 
The semi-vowel was either dropped or made into v 
(written /) : so Modern Welsh has ineudivy, a hermit, 
meaning literally (like the Irish cele de or Culdee) God's 
slave, and the river is Dyfrdwy, rarely Dyfrdwyf^ 
which means the stream of the goddess. In the Harleian 
MS. 3859 we find this river mentioned at fol. 195a, 
as a part of the boundary of the dominion of Cunedda 
and his Sons, — " Hie est terminus eorum a flumine 
quod vocatur diibr duiu. Usque ad aliud flumen 
tebi.^^ In another version, inaccurately printed in the 
' Lives of the Cambro-Brit. SS." (pp. 97-101), it is 
similarly called dubyr dviv. How Deva came to be 
the name of Chester or the Castra Legionis (whence 
the Welsh Caer Lleon, Chester) is not clear ; possibly 
it was at first the camp Ad Devam^ or "by the Dee," 
just as another station was called Ad Ansa?n ; but for 
the camp of the legion on the Dee, Ptolemy, at any 
rate, had a distinct name, consisting of the derivative 
Devana, though he was somewhat wide of the mark 
in his idea of the position of the place. 



NOTES. 297 

DiCALYDONES, pp. 94, 1 66. See Aovriica\r]^6rioc. 

DiviciACOS, p. 31. The name appears in some of 
the manuscripts of Caesar as Diviciacus, and Gaulish 
coins prove that to have been the correct Latin form : 
it is of the same origin, doubtless, as the Gaulish 
name Divico (Caesar, de Bell. Gall., i. 13). 

DoBUNNi, p. 29. This name occurs in the genitive 
singular as that of a man mentioned on an early- 
inscribed stone now at Tavistock : see " Lect. on 
Welsh Phil.," p. 400. 

DoMNOcovEROS, DoMNOVEROS, p. 40. The differ- 
ence between these two terms was probably one of 
form alone, domnoco being a derivative from domno ; 
see the remarks on Diirolipons^ where a possibly 
parallel case is mentioned. It is possible, however, 
that Doninocovej'os should be analysed Donino coveros. 
The domno of Domnoveros^ more usually dumno or 
dubno^ is probably the same word as the O. Irish 
dofuun, world ; but it is possible that it meant the 
smaller world of the tribe before meaning the world 
in a wider sense. That this was the case seems to be 
favoured by its fitting into the place of cassi in such 
names as Cassivellaunos^ by the side of which we 
have Dubnovellaunos : compare also Dumnorix, which 
seems synonymous with Toutwrix, Welsh, Tudrt, 
king of the tribe or of the people. The second 
element, vero-s, in Domno-vero-s, is probably the word 
for man, Welsh gwr^ O. Iri^hfer, Latin vir. So it is 
possible that Dom?ioveros meant the man of the 
people ; but the point cannot be established by means 
of our present data. 

Anvi]K-a\r]Uvior, p. 167. This form is particularly 
interesting, as showing the Celtic pronunciation of 
the feminine numeral, which appears in the MSS. of 
Amm. Marcellinus, as the di of his peculiar spelling 
Dicalydones : in Modern Welsh it is dwy^ and in Irish 



298 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

di, Sanskrit dve, two. But what the implied noun 
was is not evident, or whether the compound referred 
in the first place to two peoples or two tracts of country 
inhabited by them on the two sides, let us say, of the 
waters of the river Ness and the lochs connected with 
it. The inference we draw in either case is that the 
Dicalydones were a twin people, consisting of the 
Vacomagi and the other Caledonians. 

DuBNOVELLAUNOS, p. 27. The forms in the Ancyra 
inscription are incomplete, both in the Greek and the 
Latin versions : the former still shows AOM//0///- 
AAATNOS, which was probably AoiivoftiWavroQ, with 
the Greek softened ft for the Celtic v. This would ex- 
plain why the Latin is found to read dvmno-bella////, 
and it is a good instance of the utter impossibility 
of saying, from the use of Latin b in foreign names, 
whether v or b was the sound meant. ^eQlverna and 
Trinovanies ; also Domnoveros and Cassivellaunos. 

DuMNONii, pp. 43, 155, 161, 223. There were 
two peoples so called, the one in the south-west of the 
island, and the other in the north. The latter are 
frequently called Damnonii, but their real name is 
clearly identical with that of the other, as two Roman 
inscriptions exist, in which the northern Dumnonii 
are referred to as Civiias Dumnon and Civitas Dumni 
("Corpus Inscr. Lat.," vii. Nos. 775, 776), the latter 
of which would seem to stand for a genitive plural 
Du7nntonum, with a nominative singular Dujnnio, 
while the Welsh Dyfneint^ Devon, must be the result 
of a false etymology, though it recals the Dumnunti- 
orum of one of the MSS. of the Antonine Itinerary. 
Both southern and northern Dumnonii were pre- 
sumably outlying tribes of the earlier Celtic invasion 
of Britain, and only continued in common a name 
probably once popular among all Goidels ; but the 
northern Dumnonii, called also Dumnogeni (in an 



NOTES. 299 

old inscription at Yarrow), and conveniently located 
for invading Ireland both in front and from behind, 
carried it to that country. Witness Inber Domnann^ 
the old name of Malahide Bay, north of Dublin, and 
that of Erris Domnann in Mayo, where Domnann is 
the genitive of Domnu^ the name of an ancient 
goddess, their eponym.ous ancestress. There v;ere 
Dumnonians among the auxiliaries at whose head 
Labraid the Exile is supposed to have returned to 
power in Leinster some five centuries before the 
Christian era. The others were Fir Bolg, Galeoin 
and Lagin, and it is to Labraid's initiative we are 
possibly to trace the settlement of Brigantes and 
other small tribes on the coast of Leinster from 
Carnsore Point to the Liffey's mouth. They form a 
secondary group of invasions partly Goidelic and 
partly Belgo-Brythonic, not to mention the Cauci, 
for instance, whose name suggests a Teutonic people 
well-known on the Continent. These miscellaneous 
tribes have no recog;nised place in the stock 
genealogies of the Irish, and it is important to 
distinguish them from the far earlier invasions by the 
Goidels of the Eremonian group. 

DuNioN, p. 219. If it be not an accident that the 
MSS. of Ptolemy read ^ovviov and not Aoyror, the 
i of the former is of importance, as showing that we 
have here to do with a form differing from the Gallo- 
Brythonic dunon^ which makes in Welsh din, a fort 
or town. It could be explained only by the O. Irish 
word dun^ genitive dime of the same meaning. Now 
dwt has been ascertained to represent an early neuter 
stem in es, nominative dunos, genitive dunesos, which, 
when the 5 disappeared, would be dimeo, liable to 
become dunio. From dune or duni, which would 
thus be the base for the oblique ca'^es, nothing would 
be more natural than for the word, seeing that it was 



300 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

neuter, to take the form hwrtov and dunium^ in the 
writings of Greek and Latin authors, in case it had 
not been Brythonicized into dunon before reaching 
them. The Peutinger Table gives the name of a 
town fifteen miles from Isca Dumnonioru7n as Ridumo^ 
to be read as an ablative Ridunio ; but the name is 
probably incomplete, and it is proposed to take it as 
standing for Moridunio, and as indicating the town 
of Seaton, a name which is a literal rendering of the 
Celtic one ; for Moridunion would mean the sea-fort, 
and that was probably also the name of the town of 
Carmarthen on the tidal part of the Towy, though it 
is only called Maridiinon by Ptolemy. 

DuROLiPONS, p. 229. This has been supposed to 
have been situated at one of the three places, 
Ramsay, Cambridge, or Huntingdon. The Antonine 
Itinerary gives it in the ablative as Duroliponte, so 
that there cannot be a doubt that the Romans 
thought they detected in the name their word pons^ 
a bridge ; but it was quite possible that this was a bad 
guess ; and it is remarkable that the next station in 
the Itinerary has the name Durobrivce, which, seeing 
that briv- meant a bridge (being, in fact, the Celtic 
cognate of that English word. An. -Saxon brycg^ just as 
Welsh wy is in English eg^^ would have had, practi- 
cally, the same meaning as Durolipo?is, for duroli 
would have to be regarded as a derivative from diiro ; 
and Durobrtv-(B is all but the same name as that 
mentioned in another route as Durocobriv-is^ with a 
derivative duroco by the side of duro : compare 
Domnoveros and Doinnocoveros. So it is quite possible 
that the Romans were mistaken, and that the name 
in question is to be divided Duro-lipons^ with the 
same lip as in the personal name Cujialtpi, a genitive 
in an early inscription discovered in Eivionydd in 
Carnarvonshire. The other element difro, so often 



NOTES. 301 

met with in Celtic names of places in Britain and 
Gaul, appears to mean door, gate, or porch, and to 
be of the same origin as the Welsh dor a.nd drws, Irish 
dorus, a door, and the English word and its congeners. 
Duroco in Durocobrivis is probably the same word as 
the highly interesting dvorico of a Gaulish inscription, 
in which it seems to have meant some kind of a 
portico (De Belloguet's " Ethnogenie Gauloise," i. 
p. 300). But, though the etymology of duro in Celtic 
names is tolerably clear, it is not very evident what 
it exactly meant : did it refer mostly 10 the gates or 
entrances of strongholds, or to those of temples, as 
in the case of the Gaulish Iron-Door mentioned in 
the hfe of Eugendus CAct. SS., Jan. i, vol. i., p. 50, 
and "Lect. on Welsh Phil," p. 26)? Lastly, the 
etymology of the word suggests the possibility of 
some of the duro names being of the same kind as 
Forum Jtili, Forum Voconi, and the like in Gaul, 
Spain, and Italy. 

DuROTRiGES, pp. 19, 219. The meaning of the 
name is obscure, but the compound would seem to 
resolve itself into Buro- and trig-es : it is remarkable, 
however, that the name seems to admit of being 
equated with that of the Irish people called Bar- 
traighi, who have left their name to Dartry, in the 
county of Leitrim. 

Ebud^, p. 225. This name has been so treated in 
later times that it has passed through Hebudes into 
Hebrides, and attached itself to the islands north-west 
of Scotland. 

EcENi, p. 28, see Cenimagni. 

Epaticcos, p. 26. This name seems derived from 
the Gallo-Brythonic word for a horse, which must 
have been epos, whence the Welsh ebol, a colt ; but 
the unexplained termination, with its double c, reminds 
one of Boudicca : it is possibly diminutival or hypo- 
coristic, 



302 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

Epeiacon, p. 227. The affix ac would give the 
name the force of a word meaning a place abounding 
in, or in some way associated with, that which is 
denoted by the preceding syllables. The base, which 
we have here as epei, would imply a noun epei-os^ -«, 
or -on derived from epos, a horse ; but whether the 
derivative meant some kind of a horse or of a horse- 
m.an, or else was a man's name, is impossible to 
decide. The word Vereda (of which Voreda, the 
other form in the MSS., would be a somewhat later 
one) also referred to horses, as it cannot be severed 
from the Welsh word gorwydd^ a horse, which would 
imply a masculine veredos. Possibly Vereda stands 
for an earlier Veredas, genitive Veredotos (to be com- 
pared with Venedotos mentioned under Veneti), and is 
to be interpreted as meaning a place where cavalry 
were collected. Veredos is the word which became 
in Late- Latin veredus, v\ hence the hybrid paraveredus^ 
the original oi paJfrey and the German ^^r^, a horse. 

Eppillos, p. 23. It is remarkable that in this 
name the p appears always double, though the name 
is very probably a derivative from epos, a horse. The 
double / in such names seems to stand for //. Epillos 
(with one /) would be exactly the Welsh word ebill, 
an auger, a chisel, the key of a harp, though literally 
it ought to mean a little horse. 

Galli, pp. 2, 270. Here the double / is of the 
same origin as in Eppillos and AUobrox : the nomi- 
native singular would be Gallos for Galios from gal, 
which is a word met with in "Irish in the sense 
of valour, which it retains in Welsh in the compound 
ar-ial (for ar-gal), " energy, courage." 

Gangani, p. 235. Ptolemy mentions the headland 
of the Gangani as rayyarCjv aKoov, and this is to be 
traced later in Pentir Ganlon, or the headland of 
Ganion, the home of a Goidel, mentioned in a pas- 



NOTES. 303 

sage in the "Mabinogion" (ii. pp. 208, 209), where 
the MS. reads Gamon. The Goidel is spoken of 
under the title of arderchmvg Frydein, or prince of 
Prydein. Here Prydein stands, as elsewhere^ not 
unfrequently for Frydyn or Pictland, but the name 
can hardly have been applied to any part of Car- 
narvonshire. Besides the Gangani of Wales, Ptolemy 
places a people of the same name in the west of 
Ireland. 

Gerontios, p. 96. This is the name v.'hich has 
yielded in Welsh Gereint and Geraint^ borne by the 
man alluded to at p. 109. Compare Ambrosiiis 
becoming Einreis^ though more commonly Emrys. 
A simpler form of the same origin as Gerontios occurs 
in the Irish gerat or gerait^ a champion. 

Ictis, p. 45 : see I tins. 

Itius, p. 14. According to Holder, whose careful 
edition of Caesar de Bello Gallico (Freiburg, 1883) has 
proved very valuable to the student of Celtic names — 
the same remark applies on an extended scale to his 
Altceltischer Sprachschatz still in course of publication 
-^the reading of the manuscripts is Portum ItiiLin in 
both the passages (v. 2 and 5) where it occurs. We 
are, however, of opinion that the original name was 
not Itium^ but Tctium, and that the whole English 
Channel was called Mare Ictiuni^ or Ictian Sea. In 
that case Portus Ictius would designate Caesar's place 
of embarcation, somewhat in the same way that 
Dover might in English be termed the Channel 
Harbour. The former probably had a Gaulish name 
of its own, which may have become the Latin one 
also as soon as the Romans began to be a little more 
at home in the north of Gaul ; so that it would be 
labour in vain to try to detect Ictius in any place- 
name still current on the French coast. We infer 
the term Mare Ictium, or Ictian Sea, from the fact that 



304 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

the Irish used to call it Muir n-Icht^ or the Sea ot 
Icht, which was probably a pre-Brythonic name, like 
Albion or Alban. It is, however, not to be supposed 
that it had anything to do with the name of the Isle 
of Wight, Welsh Gz&yth, for an older Vecfis : this 
last might possibly become Ficht in the mouth of a 
Goidel, but not Icht. On the other hand, the Ictis 
of Diodorus Siculus (v. 22) would just meet the case; 
and it was the same island, doubtless, that Timseus, 
who was lond of quoting from the travels of Pytheas, 
is supposed to have called Mictis. The passage has 
come down to us only in Pliny's " Natural History " 
(iv. 30), where the words are insulam mictlni : the 
presence of the second 7n is presumably due to care- 
lessness or caprice on the part of a copyist. An 
instructive article on the British peninsulas which 
were islands at high tide, was published, with plans, 
by Mr. A. Tylor, in " Nature," vol. xxix., pp. 84-6. 

luDEU, pp. 134, 152. The Eidyn of the Book 
of Aneurin is supposed to have meant Edinburgh, 
and as to Carriden, one ancient interpolator 
of Gild as speaks of it as " Kair Eden civitas anti- 
quissima, duorum fernie milium spatio a monasteno 
Abercurnig, quod nunc iwcatur Abercorn, ad occidentem 
tendens^^ &c., and as being also supra^ mare Scotice, 
that is, the Firth of Forth. (See Momm sen's Chronica 
Minora^ iii. p. 18). On the whole, we are inclined 
to think, that Bede's Urbs Giudi or hidi — for that is 
said to be the reading of MS. C^ (Plummer, ib. i. 12) — 
was the same as Nennius's Urbs ludeu, and that the 
place meant was either Carriden or Edinburgh : we 
are inchned to the former. But how is one to 
account for Bede placing it in the middle of the Firth 
of Forth ? We are disposed to think that he has 
confounded two names which were partly identical, 
and that these were Urbs Giudi and Insula Giudi (if 



N0T£S. 305 

not simply Giudi) respectively. The mistake would 
be all the more natural if the island was, as at the 
present day, fortified ; for undoubtedly Bede regarded 
the place he had in view as a sort of counterpart to 
Alclyde on the opposite estuary in the west. 

IvERNA, p. 268. Dr.- Neubauer, who looked for 
the graffito a good many years ago, found that it had 
been effaced by the weather ; but a few years before 
it was carefully examined by the present Bishop of 
Salisbury, who kindly communicated the following 
reading to us : — Bassus Cherronesiia et Tertius 
Hadrumetinus et Concessus Iverna. The names 
appear to be those of three slaves, and the fact that 
the one from Erin was called Concessus is remark- 
able ; for, though that name seems to have been 
uncommon in Britain, it can be matched by a 
Concessa, to the use of which in this country we have 
testimony in the later form Conchess, the traditional 
name of St. Patrick's mother, Concessus, Concessa, 
Concessanus, and the like, v ere by no means unusual 
names in other parts of the Roman world ; but the 
only form of this group known in the Roman inscrip- 
tions of Britain is Concessinius on a stone found at 
Hexham (C. I. L., vii. No. 481). 

M^AT^, pp. 92-5, 158, 162, 166, 172. The name, 
as it occurs in Reeves's Adamnan's Life of St. 
Columba is Miati and Miathi. The meaning of the 
word is unknown, but there is no reason whatever to 
think that it has anything to do with the Goidelic 
word mag, a plain or field, as some take for granted, 
who have no notion of perspective in phonology. It 
is probably not of Celtic origin at all, and the locality 
of the Mseatse is a matter of more importance : we 
are now convinced that they were once in possession 
of the country between the Firth of Forth and that 
of Tay, between the Ochils and the sea, whatever 

X 



3o6 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

Other districts they may have occupied, as, fof 
instance, near the Northern Wall. Their name is 
perpetuated by the Ochil height called Dun-Myat, 
by Inver May and the May Water, which, rising in 
the Ochils, rushes down into the Earn near Forteviot, 
most of which it appears to have eaten away since the 
time when it was a Pictish capital, and lastly by the 
Isle of May, off the coast of Fife. It follows that the 
territory of the Mseatse was, at least in part, that 
whose inhabitants appear in subsequent history under 
the name of Verturiones. In other words, Dion 
Cassius's Caledonians and Mreatse are represented in 
Ammianus's pages by Dicalydones and Verturiones 
respectively. As to the latter, they may be regarded 
as Mseatae with an admixture of Celts forming the 
leading or ruling element among them, such Celts 
being Goidels of Dumnonian stock who had probably 
adopted Brythonic speech. Lastly, the geographical 
position of the Mseatae makes it improbable that the 
battle of Circinn was fought in the Mearns : the 
Circinn in point must have been nearer to the Wall, 
to w^hich the territory of the Mseatse reached, if we 
may trust Dion Cassius. It has been suggested to us 
that a writer of Dion's day cannot have meant the 
Northern Wall. In that case we can only say that 
Dion must have copied the words of some earlier 
waiter who did mean the Northern Wall : to us the 
Southern Wall seems inadmissible. In case, how- 
ever, a persistent push southwards was made soon 
after the Romans left Britain, it is but natural to 
suppose that such Picts as one reads of at different 
points between the Northern Wall and the neighbour- 
hood, let us say, of Dunbar, came from the Mseatse or 
Verturian country across the water. 

Maglocunos, p. 12 2. This name has been suc- 
cessively softened down into Mailcon or Mailcun, 



NOfES, 307 

and Maelgwn, wrongly written Maelgwyn. It is not to 
be confounded with the Irish Maelchon, for Brythonic 
maglo-, is in Irish mdl. a prince or hero, while Irish 
mael, a tonsured (slave), is in Welsh moel, bald or 
bare. The elements of this compound also made a 
name Cunoi7iaglos : the genitive Conomagli occurs 
("Lect. on Welsh Phil.," p. 369), and the modern 
Welsh is Cynvael. 

Maponos, p. 230. The monument to Apollo 
Maponos, found at Hexham, stands about four feet 
high, and the lettering is said to be of the finest de- 
scription ; but there are two other inscriptions which 
refer to this god. The one was found in the parish 
of Ainstable, in Cumberland (vii. No. 332), while the 
other had been cut on a fine piece of sculpture, 
made pro salute of the persons concerned, and dis- 
covered at Ribchester, near Blackburn, in Lancashire 
(vii. No. 218). The name Maponos or Mabon is de- 
rived from viapo-s, in old Welsh 7nap, now mab^ a boy, 
a youth, a son, and is formed like Welsh gwroji, a hero 
from g2ur^ a man. Mabon means a boy, and is best 
understood by looking at the Greek representations 
of Apollo, in which he was ever young and 
vigorous, and by calling to mind that in Irish mytho- 
logy the Ultonian hero Ciichulainn was always beard- 
less, which his admirers of the other sex sometimes 
excused by pretending to believe that he was too young. 
Beside the youth of Maponos and his concern for the 
health and safety of his worshippers, we learn the 
following things of him as the Mabon of the " Mabi- 
nogion " : — He was a great hunter, who had a wonderful 
hound, and he rode on a steed swift as a sea- wave ; 
when three nights old he had been stolen from 
between his mother and the wall, no one knew 
whither ; numberless ages afterwards it was ascer- 
tained by Arthur that he was in a stone prison at 

X 2 



3o8 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

Gloucester, uttering heart-rending groans and under- 
going treatment with which Apollo's bondage in 
the house of Admetus could not compare ; Arthur 
and his men succeeded in releasing him to engage 
in the great hunt of Twrch Trwyth, which could not 
take place without him (" Mabinogion," ii. pp. 225-6, 
234-5, 286-7, 300-1). Lastly he is always called 
son of Modron, which was the name of his mother. 
Now Modron implies a stem modr^ the reflex of the 
Latin mater, Eng. mother ; moreover, it is the exact 
equivalent of the Gaulish word Matrona, the name 
of the river (more correctly perhaps of the goddess 
of the river) now called the Marne. Apollo and 
Leto or Latona, with the corresponding Celtic duad 
Mabon and Modron may, perhaps, be regarded as 
a sort of pagan anticipation of the Madonna and 
Child. Welsh hagiology has very little to say about 
saints of the name of Mabon : it is quite possible 
that one or another of them is simply Apollo 
Maponos in a Christian garb. From the order 
in which Maponi comes in the lists of British 
places given by the anonymous Geographer of 
Ravenna, his temple would appear to have been 
somewhere in the south of Scotland or the north of 
England. 

ORDOVicES,pp. 81, 220. The plural Ordovices seems 
to be an adjectival formation from a simpler word 
Ordovo-s, which is Latinized into Ordous in Corba- 
lengi's epitaph : the plural would be Ordovi, which 
we seem to have in the name of a farmhouse, near 
Rhyl, in Fhntshire, to wit, Rhyd Orddwy or the ford 
of the Ordovi. The further advance of the Ordovices 
is also marked by the strong position, now called 
Dinorwig in the neighbourhood of Carnarvon, having, 
as it seems, formerly been called Dinorddwig, the 
fortress of the Ordovices : see Duppa's " Johnson's 



NOTES. 



309 



Tour in N. Wales," p. 198, where it is spelt 
Di?i07'rddwig. But still more significant is the fact 
learned from the fragment on boundaries in the " lolo 
MSS.," pp. Zd, 477, which gives the district between 
the Dovey and Gwynedd the name Caniref Orddwyf 
or the Hundred of the Ordovi : we have not succeeded 
in tracing the original, which lolo calls a book of 
Mr. Cobb's of Cardiff; but it speaks for the genuine- 
ness of the tract, that neither he nor his son, who 
undertook the translation into Enghsh, understood the 
passage. The addition of/ to Orddwy, as it were after 
the analogy oi Dyfrdwyf, is probably due to the father. 
The district appears to have been called Y Cantref 
or the Hundred par excellence, so that the distinctive 
word Orddwy ceased to be repeated. Others would 
explain these names by means of the Welsh word 
gorddwy, violence or oppression ; but violence was so 
general in former days as considerably to disqualify 
the word for topographical use. The etymon is pro'- 
bably to be found in the Welsh word gordd, a hammer 
or sledge-hammer, which was written in old Welsh 
ord as it has always been in Irish. The Ordovices 
were originally the hammerers, and the kind of 
hammer meant was probably the formidable axe- 
hammer of stone, of which specimens have been 
found in different localities in Britain : archseologists 
believe it to have been meant for war and used down 
to the Iron Age. it is not to be denied that 
the converse account of the words Ordovices and 
Ordous may prove to be the correct one, that 
is to say, that the former is a compound Ordo-vic- 
and that Ordous is a shortened form of it. In that 
case Ordo-vic-es might be interpreted as literally 
meaning " men who fight with battle-hammers, hammer 
warriors." 

Parjsi, p. |9.— According to Sir Janjes Rawisayiphig 



310 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

" Foundations of England " (London, 1898), i., 61, the 
proper seat of the Parisi seems fixed by the fact that 
as late as the 1 3th century " Paris was still the name 
of the district round Horncastle, to which we owe 
our great chronicler, Matthew Paris." If so, it would 
appear that the Parisi entered the Humber and took 
possession of a very considerable tract of country on 
both sides of that estuary. As to the Parish of Gaul 
M. d'Arbois de Jubainville conjectures that they 
formed a part of the empire of Diviciacos, and that 
some of them migrated to this country in his time : 
see " Les Celtes," pp. 23-5. 

Pennocrucion, p. 230. This name consists of 
penno-s, head or end, and crucio-^ v/hich became in Welsh 
cruc, now crug^ a heap or mound : the whole would 
mean the top or head of the mound or barrow, or 
possibly the top mound. The name is now Penkridge, 
and an intermediate form Pencrik occurs in the eighth 
century charter of yEthilhard of Wessex ; see Kemble's 
"Codex Diplomaticus," No. Ixxvi. Pencrik represents 
the Welsh pronunciation, which would then have 
been Pencruc, and is now Pencrug (as in the case of a 
hill near Llandovery in South Wales), just as nearly 
with regard to the narrow u as Bede's Dinoof does 
the personal name, which in his time was Dunot, 
later Dunawd, Dunod, being no other than the Latin 
Donatus in a Welsh form. The English having 
eventually made Pencrik into Penkridge, nothing was 
more natural than to divide the name in the wrong 
place into Penk-ridge : hence it is that the river close 
by Penkridge is said to be called the Penk. Dr. 
Stokes suggests a connexion with the name of the 
chief idol of ancient Erin, which is called Cenn 
Criiaich in the "Tripartite Life of St. Patrick," Raw- 
linson, B. 512, fol. 22^ 2. 

Petuaria, pp. 39, 230. This would be th^ wor4 



NOTES. 31 1 

for fourth, agreeing with a feminine noun which is 
not given : the exact modern equivalent is the Welsh 
pedwaredd, quarta, which suggests that the old form 
was pronounced pettvariia. 

PiCTi, pp. 160, 240. One of the latest views as to 
this word is that it represents a priaiitive form quido s 
and that its meaning is a matter of uncertainty : see 
"Les Celtes," by M. d'Arbois de Jubainville, p. 22, 
where the author refers Pictavi^ a form of the name of 
the people of Poitiers to the same origin : still more 
to the point would have been the earlier Ficto7tes. 
On the other hand Mr. Nicholson in his ''Keltic 
Researches " treats Pict as a Goidelic word. But 
there is a third possibility, nay an absolute certainty, 
that Pidus, Pidi, are purely Latin, and it is possible 
that even the native name which suggested the Latin 
was not of Celtic origin either, though only found 
treated as Celtic. The first thing to do, however, 
is to have the forms classified : let us take them as 
follows in the plural : — i. Pidones comes first as 
applied to the people of Poitiers already mentioned ; 
but we find it also as a name of the peoples of North 
Britain : witness Tigernach's annals, published by 
Stokes in the " Revue Celtique," xvij., 251, 253, and 
see also Skene's "Chronicles of Pictsand Scots," p. 76; 
Hennessy and MacCarthy's "Annals of Ulster, a.d. 
749," and Reeve's " Adamnan," pp. 385, 386. _ It is 
further probable that Pidores is everywhere in the 
Chronicles to be corrected into Pictones. As to the 
genitive plural Pidorum^ it is more difficult to decide 
whether it should be corrected into Pidonum or taken 
as belonging to the purely Latin form Pidi, In any 
case the term Pictones, as occurring in Gaul in Caesar's 
time makes it probable that it was also a name of long 
standing in Britain, many centuries before Tigernach's 
time, 3. Pidones mih \Xs modified into a suggests 



312 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

Goidelic treatment, of which we have an instance in 
the Latin Pictaneus^ of which the genitive plural 
Pidaneorum occurs in the " Life of St. Cadroe " cited 
in Skene's Chronicles, p. io8. He has also Pictavi 
repeatedly in one of them, namely, the Pictish 
Chronicle in the same volume, pp. 3-10 : he read 
Pictania^ but we think the right reading is Picfafiia : 
see " The Welsh People," p. 79. 3. There must have 
been a more purely Goidelic form of the name, 
to wit, Pictiu^ genitive Picten-a{s), nominative plural 
Pictin-e{s), and we have evidence of it in the Latin 
creation Pidinia for Fortrenn : see Skene, loc. cit., 
p. 137, Reeves's " Chronicon Hyense," (a.d. 664, 
866) in his " Adamnan," pp. 376, 391. 4. Pidi^ 
meaning painted or tattooed, was the Latin name 
suggested, partly, no doubt, by the first syllable of the 
native Pidones^ and partly by the fact that the peoples 
of North Britain practised tattooing, which is proved by 
Herodian's statement (p. 242 above) made long before 
the term Pidi appeared in liierature referring to them. 
This, however, does not prove that the word Pictones 
itself had any reference whatsoever to the tattooing : 
we must be content, with M. d'Arbois de Jubainville, 
to regard it as of uncertain meaning ; only our 
ignorance is greater than his, as we know not from 
what language it comes. In any case we can discover 
no certain use for quido-s ; but it is true that an Irish 
word ddit is given in Cormac's Glossary, and that it 
looks like Pidus^ borrowed and treated in the same 
way 2i.s pascha made into caisg^ "Easter or Passover," 
and as in the case of a few other well-known instances. 
But it is to be noticed that the meaning given to ddit 
is that of carver or engraver. 5. From Pidi^ current 
doubtless in the latinity of the south and east of the 
province towards the end of the Roman occupation, 
the English settlers seem to have readily made their 



NOTES. 313 

Peohtas^ which survives in Broad Scotch as Pechts, 
used more or less as meaning Fairies, or more 
correctly speaking, for the Picts and the Fairies con- 
founded with one another. It is from such an English 
source that we have the comparatively late Norse 
Petta^ as in Pettlandzfiordr, " the Sea of Pictland," con- 
fined by modern geography to the Pentland Firth. 
For, as already mentioned (p. 153), the Pentland 
Hills derive their name from a Brythonic Pe?in-llann^ 
whence Pen-thland, with the usual thl for the strong 
spirant //: in fact the pronunciation with thl survives 
to this day in the neighbourhood of Pencaitland, the 
// of which a Welsh friend of ours has heard as thl. 
The comparative prevalence of names beginning 
with Peoht in Anglo-Saxon seems to require explana- 
tion. Dr. Henry Bradley has supplied the writer with 
the following note : They are naturally most numerous 
towards the north ; there were bishops of Whithern 
named Peohthelm (730), Peohtwine (763-776), and 
the "Liber Vitae" of Durham supplies Peohtgils, 
Peohthaeth, Peohthun, Peohtwulf, while more southern 
examples are Peohthad (Middlesex, 704), Peohthaeth 
(Worcester, 692), Peohtred (Kent, 863), Peohthan 
(moneyer. East Anglia), and Peoht wald (moneyer, 
Mercia, 8th century). 

Remi, p. 29. Remi was the name of the leading 
Belgic people, and it would seem to be of the same 
origin as the Welsh word rhwyf^ a king, Irish riani^ 
before, and the Latin primus, first; compare the 
English first and the German fiirst, a prince. The 
name of the Remi would thus be of the same flattering 
description as that of the Caturiges and others. 

SciTLivissi, p. 254. Now and then Irish resolves 
its compound terms : thus, a field for athletic games 
is called cliichimag, or game-field, but also mag 
i?i cluchi, or a field for games ; both forms are 



314 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

found very near one another in the " Book of the Dun 
Cow," namely, at 59a, 59b, 60a, and 60b. So with 
the genitive scitlivissi, we have nowhere else met 
with the compound, but we would identify it with the 
resolved term in the same manuscript, fol. 55b, 
where it occurs as Jis seel. Here viss- and fis are to 
be regarded as meaning knowledge, and as being 
of the same origin as the Irish fess, "^ was known," 
fissi, " sciendum," and the English word wise. The 
rest, scitl- and seel, meant a story, news, or 
tidings : compare so-seele, good news, gospel. The 
Welsh equivalent is elnvedl, for an older chwedl of 
the same meaning as the Irish seel. The two taken 
together prove the common Celtic stem to have once 
been sqvedl. If this last is to be treated as standing 
for s{e)qvedl, as suggested by Prof. Zimmer, we have 
to do with a word of the same origin as the English 
say, the German sagen, and Norse saga. The reduc- 
tion by the Goidels of original sqv to se, and by the 
Brythons to sv (whence Welsh ehw) may prove of 
some use, if not confined to wxTds borrowed from 
Irish, in distinguishing between the Celts of the two 
branches of the family; for we have it in other Welsh 
words, such as ehwydu, to vomit, Irish seeifh, ey-ehwyn^ 
to start, Irish, seind, flew, sprang, started; and chwalu, 
to scatter or disperse, Irish, sedilim, "I let loose, 
scatter, or disperse " : compare the Scotch verb to 
skail, said of a congregation dispersing at the end of 
a meeting, exactly in the same way as hwalu in the 
Welsh of Cardiganshire. There remains the question 
of meanings, for while scitlivissi in the inscription 
referred to a man, yfj- seel meant news or information, 
— literally, knowledge of news or intelligence of 
tidings. So it may be surmised that scitliviss- might 
mean either a message or a messenger, news or a 
bringer of news, We need go no further than th© 



NOTES. 315 

passage referred to for a somewhat parallel case ; for 
there Maive says : rdncatar mo thechta-sa coiucsat fis 
seel dam-sa ass, "my scouts have come and brought 
me news from there." Here techta, scouts, is the 
plural of iechf^ a messenger or scout ; but the latter is 
also the same word as the verbal noun techt, the act 
of going. Compare the Welsh feminine cennad, 
which means not only a messenger, but also a 
message of permission or leave ; still better known is 
the double meaning of the Latin word nuncius. There 
is, however, a shorter and perhaps a better way of 
interpreting the word, to wit, as an adjectival forma- 
tion scit/iviss-e, genitive scitliviss-i, " relating to news, 
information," and hence "a person who acquires such 
information, a scout or emissary." 

Segontiaci, p. 17. They came to make peace 
with Caesar, and to their name must be added that of 
the Roman fortress near Carnarvon, called Segontion, 
which is made in Welsh into Seiont, and even into 
Seint, Saint in the name of the river flowing by. The 
syllable seg in these words is probably of the same 
origin as the German sieg, victory^ and lends a pre- 
sumption in favour of Segeia as against Seteia as the 
name of the divinity of the river. If, as Dr. Henry 
Bradley suggests, the Dee was meant, the name would 
appear still more appropriate : see Deva. 

Selgov^, p. 220. This is explained by the Irish 
word selg, hunting, the chase, as in coin seilge, 
a pack of hounds, Welsh avnhela: the Old Welsh 
imperative for hunt was helgha, now helia and hela. 

Senotigirnios, p. 41. No coin gives more than 
Seno in one part and Hgir (or tigip) in another. 
Senotigirnios would be in Welsh hen-d'eyrn, from hen, 
old, O. Irish, sen- ; and t'eyrn, a lord or prince, Irish, 
tigerna, lord. 

Setantii, p. 2 2 3, The alternative Segantii is given 



3l6 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

in Ptolemy's Geography, and, similarly, the name of 
the river is either Seteia or Segeia : probably Setantii 
is to be preferred, as of the same origin as Setanta, 
the first name of Ciichulainn, the hero of Irish 
legend, which indirectly suggests British ancestry in 
his case. 

SiLURES, pp. 42, 81. The origin and meaning of 
this word are utterly unknown, but it is worth while 
noting that the name of the chief man connected with 
the temple of Nodens at Lydney Park on the western 
bank of the "Severn in the country of the Silures has 
been there read silvlanvs (Berlin, " Corpus Inscr. 
Brit. Lat," No. 140), and that there is no need to make 
it into Silvianus or Silvanus: it should rather be read 
Silulamis, silul- being equated with the silur- of the 
word Silures. Probably the name given by Solinus 
as that of an island, Silura, whether he meant the 
land of the Silures or the Scilly Isles, is of the same 
origin. Sulpicius Severus, however, who flourished 
about the end of the fourth century, leads us to infer 
that the Scilly Islands did bear a name cognate with 
that of the Silures, for, in his "Chronica" (ed. Halm), 
ii. 51, he uses the words, in Sylinanchn insulam^ qucs. 
ultra Britannias sita est, deportatus, and again, in 
Sylinancim insulam datiis. The MS. which gives this 
reading is of the eleventh century, but the editors go 
their own way and print " Sylinain insulamy Sylinancis 
is not an easy form to deal with, but it seems to be 
the only one attested, and it is possibly derived from 
some such a one as Silulancis, with the same sihd as 
Sihdanus. Some form of this name of the islands 
must have been in use when the Danes began to call 
them Syllingar, or Syllings, with which may be com- 
pared a passage in W. Smith's "Particular Descrip- 
tion of England, 1588" (London, 1879), in which he 
speaks, p, 6q, of '' the Isles of Soriingues, commonly 



/ 



NOTES. 



317 



called ''the Sillies": they are still Sorlingues in 
French. 

TiEXALi, pp. 164, 234. The headland of the same 
name is called Tai^aXor uKpov in Ptolemy's Geography, 
and I am persuaded that the Trucculensis Porius men- 
tioned by Tacitus (Agr., 38) meant a place on the 
same part of the coast; but it is impossible to say 
which of the two, Tcexal- Truccul-, makes the nearest 
approach to the real name meant to be reproduced. 
The fleet may have wintered at Keith Inch, the small 
island at Peterhead. 

Tasciovans, p. 26. Some of the various forms of 
the genitive on the coins are tasciovani, tasciio- 
VANii, TASCiiovANTis, together with such abbrevia- 
tions as Tasciov, Tasciav, Tascio, Tascia, Taxcia 
Taxci. The double / is probably to be read E^ 
which is found to be one of the ways of representing 
the semi- vowel i in such Gaulish names as OuiXAoj toq 
and the like ; the vowel £ being perhaps the nearest 
approach to the semi-vowel which Greek spelling 
suggested. That this can, however, have been the 
value of the 11 at the end of tasciiovanii is doubtful ; 
it probably argues a genitive corresponding to a nomi- 
native Tasciova?iios. Whether the x in some of these 
forms had any value diff'erent from s is also doubtful ; 
but the use here of x reminds one of the name of the 
Cantian king whom C^sar calls Taximagulus. The 
hesitation between Tasciovani- and Tasciavan- shows 
that the formative vowel was but slightly pronounced, 
and ready to disappear ; the old inscriptions of Wales 
give parallels in such names as Senomagli and Sene- 
7fiagli, Trenegussi and Trenagusu, Welsh pedigrees 
have Teuhant and Tecwanf, and Geoffrey of Mon- 
mouth Tenuafitius or Teneuan^ which had as their 
common original probably an Old Welsh form 
Teheuant or Techuant, representing an early stem 



3r8 C£LTlC BRitAlN. 

Tacsi-vdni- with, tacs and not tasc. Possibly the 
name meant a brock-spearer or hunter of badgers : 
compare Brohomaglos^ ' badger prince,' and see Holder, 
s.v. taxea, ' lard,' and Taocimagu/us, also " The Welsh 
People/' p. 90. Geoffrey probably had his data in 
some Brythonic genealogy, but whose ? I conjecture 
it was that of a northern family : the Nennian pedigree 
X in The Cymmrodor, ix., p. 174, derives Dyvnwal 
Moelmud from Coel Godebog, whose daughter Gwawl 
is said to have been Cunedda's mother (lolo MSS., 
p. 121), and makes Coel himself son of Tecmant, 
son of Teuhant. Add to this that the 57 th of the 
Englyns of the Graves (Evans's " Black Book of 
Carmarthen," p. 34^^ Skene, ii. 33) mentions a Coel 
son of Kinvelin, a juxtaposition of names which 
suggests that Caratacos was not the sole warrior of 
his family who escaped to the North — that, in fact, 
there were others who succeeded in reaching the 
Brigantes, and in making their way farther, namely, 
to the princes of the Dumnonii, among whom they 
remained, perhaps, and flourished. 

TiNCOMMios, p. 23. This name looks as if com- 
pounded of Comniios and another element ti?i^ which 
is possibly the same word as the Welsh preposition, 
tdn^ as in tan y fainc^ under the bench, tan y fory, till 
to-morrow, literally, " under or up to the morrow." 
One cannot help identifying with this the Latin tenus, 
as far as, up to, and possibly the Irish word tdnaise, 
second, also the tanist or heir-apparent in Goidelic 
succession. In that case Tincommios was not only a 
son of Commios, but bore a name meaning a " second 
Commios," a man like Commios, or Commios's re- 
presentative. This would place the name within a 
well-known category of Welsh epithets or surnames 
with eil or ail, second, as in Morvran eil Tegid, 
and Cadivallawn eil Cadfan, " Cadwallon, second- 



NOTES. 319 

Cad van/' — Cadvan was his father (see the " Mabi- 
nogion," ii. 206, and the " My v. Arch.," ii p. 408, 
triad 80). Tin-coimnios did not stand alone, for the 
name accompanying that of Dubnovellaunos on the 
Augustus monument at Ancyra begins with Tim or 
Tm ; nor is it improbable that such a Gaulish name 
as Tessignius or Te^^icnius stands for an earlier 
Tensignios, while the same initial element without 
the s is to be detected in the feminine Tenigenonia, 
of the same origin, and occurring in an inscription 
from Cisalpine Gaul ("C. Ins. Lat.," v. No. 3345). 
These forms would have, perhaps, to be interpreted 
after the analogy of such Latin names as Secundinus, 
Secundianus, Secundillus, and the like. 

ToGODUMNOs, p. 35. At first compound names 
doubtless had a definite and clear meaning ; but, for 
the purpose of multiplying those with a common 
element in the same family, they were manipulated 
freely, as in the case of a Carmarthenshire inscription 
commemorating Barrivendi son of Vendubari : com- 
pare the Greek Awpo^f o^ and 0£o^wpoc, "iTTTrop^^oe and 
"Apx^TrTToc, and many more ; also the Ang.-Saxon royal 
names. Perhaps in this case the compound Togo- 
duvinos was suggested by the other, Duimiotogos : the 
latter, according to what was surmised under Domno- 
veros^^ovXdi mean the protection of the people or the 
defender of the state, togo being of the same origin as 
O. Welsh to^ a cover or roof, Irish tuige^ and the 
English thatch, German dach^ Latin tegere^ to cover, 
to protect. Cogidumnos would have to be explained 
similarly, cogi being possibly the word which is in 
Mod. Welsh cae^ a fastening of any kind, such as a 
brooch, a hedge or fence, and, in a secondary and later 
sense, the area the fence encloses — that is, a field. It is 
probably of the same origin (as well as meaning) as 
the English hedge^ German hag. 



3^0 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

TrinoV ANTES, p. 17. It is hard to decide whether 
we should write Trinovantes or Trmobantes^ but Tas- 
ciovanfs name, together with Ptolemy's T^ivoavrtc^ 
inclines us to prefer the former. In triiio- we seem 
to have the Welsh word trm^ a battle or conflict, and 
the whole word Trinovantes would then mean battle- 
piercers, or men who penetrate the array of battle 
opposed to them. 

Trucculensis or Trutulensis, p. 89. See Tcexali. 

UxELODUNON, p. 234. Uxeloduno7i is found written 
mostly with //, which is, however, contrary to the 
evidence of the living words, Welsh, uchel^ high, Irish, 
uasal^ high-born, noble. But on a bronze cup this 
name, which should be in the ablative, is found 
engraved Vxelodvmc, and it is best explained by 
supposing that the spelling meant to be written was 
Uxelodimio (" C Insc. Lat.," vii. No. 1291 and p. 104). 
The anonymous Geographer of Ravenna wrote Uxel- 
ludamo, which in its in bears witness to an ni, while 
the MSS. of the Notitia Dignitatum point to one /, 
as ihey read Axeloduno and Axdoduno. As to dunon 
being Brythonic, and dimmi more Goidelic than 
Brythonic, see Diinion. In either case the compound 
would mean the high town or the lofty fortress. 

UxELLA, UxELLON, p. 234. Thcse may be either 
inaccurately written for Uxela, Uxelon, which would 
be the adjectives in the feminine and neuter singular, 
agreeing with nouns not given ; or else they may be 
derived forms, standing for Uxelia, Uxelion, The 
stem tixel; meaning high is the same as that of the 
Greek v\pri\6c, high, and both are probably from the 
{^ame root as the English word 2//>, but the Celts 
have changed the labial into a guttural, as in Irish 
secM, ''^ septemT Greek, however, has no parallel to 
l\Lri\()', but the Celts have one in the Welsh adjective 
ise/, Irish, ise/^ low, from the old preposition m (in 



NOTES. 321 

Mod. Welsh yn)^ of the same origin and meaning as 
the Enghsh in and the Latin in, which in its derivative 
imus p"or insmus ?), lowest, comes to the same meaning 
as the Welsh superlative of isel, to wit, isaf, lowest, 
the comparative being is, lower. This element enters 
possibly into the name of the Insubres, and of the 
British towns of Isurion and Isitbrigantion. The s of 
the stems iip-s and in-s implied in the Greek and 
Celtic words raises an interesting question which 
cannot be discussed here. 

Vacomagi, p. 163. It has been suggested to us 
that this name is an approximate reproduction of a 
Celtic compound meaning the inhabitants of the open 
plains, as contrasted with the adjoining tract covered 
by the Caledonian Forest. In that case vaco- is to be 
equated with the Welsh word gwag, " empty," and 
7nag- with Welsh ina, Irish ijiagh, "a plain or open 
field." Possibly the name is a shortened form of 
Vacomag-ii. 

Veneti^ p. 9. The word is most likely of the same 
origin as the Anglo-Saxon wine, a friend, and meant 
allies : the Irish Ji7ie, a tribe or sept, is probably 
related, and io may be the Welsh Gwynedd ; but the 
latter is inseparable from Givyndod, which is of the 
same meaning. They probably represent an early 
Brythonic Venedas, genitive Venedotos, Gwynedd 
being from the nominative, and Gwyndod from the 
stem of the oblique cases. Venedotos is made in 
Latin into Venedotis in an inscription at Penmachno, 
near Bettws y Coed: Hiibner's Tnscr. Brit. Christ., 
No. 135. The Veneti have left their name to the 
part of Brittany called by the Bretons Guened, 
Vannes, and it is this name probably that laid the 
foundation for the tales which trace an army of 
Kymry from Gwynedd to Guened. 

Vereda, p. 230 : see Epeiacon. 

Y 



32 2 CELTIC BRITAIN. 

Vergobretos, p. 59. The analysis of the com- 
pound would suggest an adjective qualifying the name 
of the magistrate, and meaning efflcax jtidicii^ working 
or executing judgment. For the first part, vergo, 
seems identical with the Old Breton word guerg 
"efficax," and akin to Welsh, cy-weirio^ to mend, to 
dress, or put in working order, Irish, do-airc-i or 
tairci "efficit, parat," a verb of the same origin and 
conjugation as the Greek joeX^, e'jO^w, I do or make, 
Gothic vaurkjan, to work. The other part breto- is 
identical with the Welsh bryd, mind, intention, ded- 
Jryd^ a verdict \ Irish, breth, judgment, brithem^ geni- 
tive brithemon, a judge. Anglicised brehon. All these 
words are connected with the root ber^ to bear, and 
the standing Irish law phrase for giving judgment is 
to " bear a breth,^^ which literally means to bear a 
bearing, or bear a birth^ and seems to point to some 
kind of supposed inspiration, brought about in a way 
similar, perhaps, to that whereby the Irish druids 
were believed to obtain visions of things to come. 
See Cormac's Glossary, s. v. imbas forosnai, and 
O'Donovan's "Battle of Magh Rath," pp. 46, 47, 
also Scott's " Lady of the Lake," canto iv. 5. 

Verturiones, pp. 94, 224. This is usually written 
Vecturiones, which we tried in vain to understand, 
but on converting it into Goidelic, according to the 
usual rules of phonology, we found that it would yield 
Fechtrenn or Fochtrenn, which at once suggested the 
real name Fortrenn. On turning to Eyssenhardt's 
edition of Amm. MarcellinuSj we were delighted to 
find that Veduriones only comes from Gelenius, who 
lived in the sixteenth century, and that it has no manu- 
script authority whatever. The name is of the same 
origin as Verterce,^ mentioned as one of the places 
where the Dux Britanniarum had some of his men 
quartered. It is found to have been at Brough-under- 



NOTES. 323 

Stanmore, in Westmoreland ; and Brough {i.e. burh, a 
fortress) is a translation, probably, of Verterce, for the 
latter is represented in Welsh by the word gwerthyr, 
a fortification, and Y Werthyr occurs as the name 
of a house in Anglesey, situated near the remains of 
considerable earthworks and a large cromlech, also 
of another in the parish of Llangian in Lleyn. Dr. 
Stokes has pointed out to us the Sanskrit equivalent 
in vartra, a dyke, German zverder^ an embankment. 
The Chronicles usually speak only of the Plain of 
Fortrenn or of the Men of Fortrenn ; so Forfrenn, 
which is_ a genitive, is almost the only case of the 
word which they give : the nominative in its old form 
would probably have been Fortriu or Foirtriu, later 
Foirtre, while the dative should, according to analogy, 
have the optional forms Fortrinn ("Chronicon 
Hyense," in Reeve's '' Adamnan,'' p. 376), and 
Fortriu like the nominative. This latter is possibly 
to be detected in the obscure place-name Foircu in 
Todd's '' Irish Nennius," p. 148 j but Dr. Skene, in 
his_ " Chron. of the Picts and Scots," p. 43, prints it 
Foirciu, which may well have been somebody's mis- 
read mg of Foirtriu, seeing that tri would usually be 
found contracted into a t (easily confounded with c) 
with an / written above it. The whole line is, O chrich 
Chath CO Foirciu, which has been rendered " from 
the region of Cat to Forchu," whereby Dr. Skene 
understood Scotland from Caithness to the Forth. 
Here also, possibly, Fothrev-e belongs, comprising 
approximately Kinross and Clackmannan. 

Victoria, p. 16 r. Such a name could hardly 
have been expected beyond the limits of the Roman 
province, and it is, perhaps, worth while to 
suggest that it was possibly an approximate repro- 
duction only of a native one which it bore. Then 
the question comes, what the latter may have been. 

Y 2 



324 



CELTIC BRITAIN. 



Evidently a repetition of VertercB would hardly fit, 
and we cannot postulate a form Vertoria or Virtoria; 
but there seems to be no serious reason why we 
should not assume it to have been Verturia or else 
Verturio^ the singular, in point of formation, of the 
plural Verturiones. Such a vocable would perhaps 
be sufficiently like Victoria m sound to have induced 
the Romans to treat it as the Latin word. The 
Sanskrit and German vartra and werder forbid our 
postulating Vercttiria^ which would approach still 
nearer, as well as supply an excuse for Gelenius 
writing Vectmiones. 

VoRTiPORi, p. 258. This name does not prove 
the bearer to have been a Brython, as it may have 
been a sort of metaphony or translation of a Goidelic 
vocable. This is forcibly suggested by the discovery 
in Dyved of a bilingual inscription in point, which 
reads in Latin Me?Jioria Voteporigis Protidoris and in 
Ogam VotecorigaSj the genitive of the name in 
Goidelic. The presence of the latter proves the man 
commemorated to have been a Goidel, though 
Brythonic was evidently the Celtic language in the 
ascendant m spite of its having to give way to Latin 
as the official idiom of the time. It is possible that the 
deceased was no other than the prince whom Gildas 
addressed as Vortipori. For more about these names 
see the " Archaeologia Cambrensis " for 1895, pp. 307- 
313. The title oi protector suggests that the bearer, 
whoever he may have been, was regarded as holding 
a position in the Roman army, though Rome had 
long since given Britain up. 

Vriconion, pp. 234, 308. Ptolemy's Geography 
gives Ovi^omvLov^ and the Itinerary has, among others, 
the forms viroconio, uiriconio^ urico?iiOj urioconio, and 
uriocunio ; but when we take into account the modern 



NOTES. 325 

name, which is Wroxeter, and that of the neighbour- 
ing high ground, which is called the Wrekin, the pre- 
ference must be given to urkonio, and the Celtic name 
represented must be regarded as having been not 
Uriconion, but Vriconion. It may have meant a spot 
where rods and saplings grew, while it should in 
modern Welsh be Gwrygon, which we doubtless have 
in the Caer Guncon of Nennius. Gwrygon or 
Guricon appears to have originally been the name of 
the district in which that caer or town stood, and it 
has been pointed out to us that it is called Ui^econn, 
that is to say, Wrecomt, in a poem in the Red Book 
of Hergest. It refers to another fortress situated 
there, called Dinlle Ureconn, whereby it was meant 
probably to distinguish that Dinlle from the Dinlle 
near the Menai Straits : see Skene's ^' Four An. Books 
of Wales," ii. p. 288. 



INDEX 



Adamnan, 72, 91, 158, 168, 

244, 273, 305, 312 
AStJedomaros, 36, 279, 280 
Adminius, 34, 280 
Adrian, Pope, 243 
Aed Finn, 179, 180, 185 
Aedan, 158, 159, 171, 172, 176 
Aedui, 38, 40, 59 
Aenacb, In, 65 
Aerven, 68 
aes, 21 

^schylus, 205 
^ternus, 118 
^thelfrith, 114, 127, 129, 130, 

I33i 150 
^thelred, 189 
^thelstan, 109, no, 188 
^thelweard, 144 
^thilhard, 310 
Agathyrsi, 54 
Agricola, 86-90, 163, 166, 

229, 258 
Agrippa, M. Maenius, 247 
Aircol, 258 
Airem, 269 
Airer Dalriatai, 275 
Airer Gaethel, 275 
Alauna, 161, 280 
Alban, 187, 206, 207 
Albanactus, 144 
Albion, 204-206 
Albiona, 205 



Alclyde, 146, 147, 172, 185 
Allectus, 93, 240 
ail-fro, 140 
Allobrox, 140, 280 
Alpin, 176-184, 2C0 
Alun, 280 
Ambiorix, 6r 
Ambresburh, 107 
Ambrosius, 104, 105, 107, 303 
Ammianus Marcellinus, 91, 

94, 167, 243, 297, 322 
Amminus, 34, 280 
Ancalites, 17, 28, 29 
Anderida, 106 
Angus, 176, 197 
Anlacb, 248 
Anlaf Cuaran, 188, 248 
AnteSfigus, 37, 38, 281 
Antonine It, 230, 233, 234, 

294, 298, 300 
Antoninus, 90, 93 
Antony, 23 
Apollo, 19, 33, 67, 230, 294, 

307, 308 
Aquitania, 48 
"ApxiTTiros, 319 
Arderydd, 146, 257 
xA.rgentocoxos, 56 
Argyle, 275 
Armorica, 228 
Arregaethel, 275 
Artbranan, 273 



328 



CELTIC BRITAIN. 



Arthur, 73, 104, 108, 136, 236- 

239, 307 ^ , 

Arthuret, Knows 0% 140 

Artorius, 239 

Assedomari, 279 

Asser, 109 

Atbret ludeu, 134 

Atecotti, 56, 91, 94, 113; 222, 

235, 240, 279 
Atrebates, 10, 23-25, 29, 43, 

28 r, 252 

Augusta, 102 

Augustine, 127 

Augustus Caesar, 25-27, 32-34) 

208 
Aulerci, 292 
Aulus Didius, 83 
Aulus PJautius, 29, 35 76, yy, 

80 
Aurelius Conan, 107 
Avienu?, 47, 268 

Badonicus, Mons, 108 

Baetan mac Cairill, 158, 159 

Binatia, 164 

Barrivendi, 319 

Beadwolf, 150 

Bede, 97, "S, I30-T39> 169, 171, 

174, 223, 267, 275, 304 
Belerion, 8, 45, 218 
Belgae, 4, 42, 44, 79, 217 
Bali, 126 

Beli, son of Benlli, 263 
Belinos, 294 
Belisama, 68, 282 
Bellovaci, 23 
Bergyon, 205, 287 
Bericos, 37, 38, 76 
Bernicia, 90. 114, 129, 133, 

145, 146, 189 223 
Bernicii, 113, 114 
Berroc, 29 
Betb, 267 



Bibrax, 29 

Bibroci, 17, 28, 29 

Biceot, 266 

Biturix, 65, 282 

Blatobulgion, 233, 282, 283 

Boia, 231, 258 

Boresti, 89, 95, 163, 224, 283 

Boudicca, 66, 85, 230, 284, 

301 
Bjurges, 282 
Boyd Dawkins, Prof., 21, 48, 

262 
Boyne, 67, 265 
Bradley, Dr. H., 80, 283, 313, 

Bran, 282 

Bran Dub, 283 

bratt, 212, 213 

Branwen, 282 

brecht, 211 

Bieennych, 113 

Breiz, 215 

Brennus, 284 

Bret, Brettas, An.-Sax., iii, 
138 

Bretagne, 210 

Bretain, 208, 293 

Brethonec, 209 

brethyn, 2ri 

bretnais, 212 

BpeTTavoi, 2o8 

Brettones, 2ri 

Bretwalda, 137, 138 

Brezonek, 209 

Brigantes, 30, 40, 63, 66, 81, 
85, 90-2, 113, ir8, 156, 221, 
223, 284 285, 293, 299, 318 

Btigif, 285 

B itain, 137, 138, 204-10 

Lesser, 209 

Lower, 9S, loi 

Upper, 98, 100, 112, 115, 

116 
B.itanni, 207-11 



INDEX. 



329 



Britannia, 99, 204, 207, 208, 

210, 2S5 
brith, 211, 213 
Briton, 3, 210 
Brittia, 214, 215 
Britto, Brittones, 209-214, 217, 

284, 291 
Brochvae), 127, 128, 138 
Brohomaglus, 318 
Brough, 323 
Brude MacMaelchon, 157, 

168, 169, 179, 193, 198, 273 
Brude, son of Bile, 172 

son of Wurgust, 179 

Brunnanburh, 188 
Brychan, 159, 256 
Brynkir, 255 
Bryten, An.-Sax., 138 
Brython, 3, 211 
Brythoneg, 209 
Buddwalan, 290 

Cadavael, 134, 135, 141 

Ca?y5i, 29 

Cadoc, 122, 260 

Cadommedd, 135 

Cadvan, 127-29, 131, 319 

Cadwal, 293 

Cadwaladr, 128, 134, 135, 143, 

144, 290 
Cadwallon, 128, 131-33, 136- 

8,250, 290,318 
Caer Drywyn, 220 
Caer Weir, 119 
Caejarians, 136, 139 
Cairuuisc, 109 
Cait, 152 
Calathros, 160 

Caledo Caledones, 165, 232 
Caledonia, 88, 285 
Caledoniin Forej^t, 39, 226, 

284 
Calgacos, 89, 229, 285 
Caligula, 34 



Cdlleva, 24 29, 286 
Calvus Patricii, "ji 
Cambrensis, 145 
Cambria, 116, 141, 142, 144., 

145 
Cambrinus, 145 
Camulodunon, 26, 27, 78, 81, 

85, 106, 286 
Camuloris, 286 
Camulos, 286 
Cantii, 24, 25, 31, 43, 105 
Cintion, 18, 24, 25, 62 
Caratacos, 35, 38, ^T, 82, 

286, 318 
Carausius, 93, 210, 240, 286 
Carbantorigon, 233, 287 
Carini, 225 
Carnoban, 149 
Carnonacas, 225 
Carriden, 134, 153, i6o, 304 
Carron, 160 
Carthach, Ir., 286 
Carthaginians, 5, 47, 48, 51 
Cartismandua, 39, 66, 82, 83, 

287 
caseus, 54 

Cassi, 17, 28, 29, 35, 287 
Cassiterides, 44, 46, 48, 204, 

287 
Cassius, Dion, 29, 37, ']']^ 92, 

97 
Cassivellaunos, 15-18, 27, 28, 

62, 63, 248, 284, 289, 297 
Castra Exploratorum, 247 
Caswallon, 248, 289 
Cdtamanus, 128 
Catscaul, 133 
Catti, 29, 35, 37, 62, 287 
Caturiges, 30, 200, 313 
Catuvellauni, 15, 20, 26-31, 

35. 36, 38, 62, ^T, 78, 291 
Cauci, 299 
caws, 54 
Ce, 273 



330 



CELTIC BRITAIN. 



Ceadwalla, 135 

Ceawlin, 108, 141 

Celtse, 2, 291 

Celtchar, 286 

Celyddon, 226, 285 

Ctrnimagni, 17, 28, 291 

Cenwalh, 109 

Cerones, 225, 273 

Cessair, 288 

Cicero, 8, 20, 208, 219 

Cimber, 144 

Cimbri, 281 

Cinaeth, 182-185 

Cinglas, Cynlas, 122, 123 

Circinn, 158, 159, 171 

Clackmannan, 155 

Claudian, 242 

Claudius Caesar, 18, 30, 35, 38, 

39. 43, 76-78 
Clontarf, 189 
Clota, 148 
cloth, 213 
Clut, 148 

Clwyd, 86, 147, 148, 295 
Clyde, 88, 148, 149 
Cnut, 190, 196 
Cocboy, 133 
Coel, 118, 145, 318 
Cogidumnos, 79, 292, 319 
Collas, The, 3, 246 
Columba, St., 71, 72, 157, 158, 

168, 169. 171, 174, 179, 183, 

193, 198, 272-274 
Comes Lit. Sax., 103-5, 138 
Commios, 10-12, 18, 22-25, 

30, 31, 61,62, 292, 318 . 
Commodus, 210 
Conall, 180 
Conbellini, 254, 292 
Concangion, 235, 292 
Concessus, 305 
Conchess, 305 
Condidan, 108 
Congus, 177 



Co.im£egl, 108, 138 
Conovium, 287 
Constantine, 94, 97, 107, 181, 
182, 185, 187, 188, 194, 195 
Constantius Chlorus, 167 
Corbalengi, 221 
Coritani, 30, 38, 106, 221, 293 
Cornavii, 30, 38, 221, 226, 293 
Coroticus, 260 
Correos, 41 
Corstopiton, 229 
Creones, 225 
Crown of B., 135, 139 
Cruithne, 152, 156, 241, 246, 

Cruthni, the, 241, 242, 245 

crys, criss, 119 

Cuchulainn, 307, 316 

cuirm, 7 

Caldec;, 296 

Culen, 195 

Cambria, 116, 141, 144-49, 151 

Canalipi, 294, 300 

Cunchar, 195 

Cunedda, 1 18-126, 143, 250, 

255-259, 261 
Cuneglasos, 122, 123, 294 
Cunobelinoi, 26-28, 32-36, 

38, ^^, 78, 82, 294 
Cunomori, 294 
Canovali, 294 
Cu-R6i, 266, 286, 287 
Cuthberht, 147 
cwrw, 7 
Cymbeline, 27 
Cymraes, 281 
Cymru, 14: 
Cynegils, no 
Cynfelyn, 294, 318 
Cynvael, 307 
Cynwal, 294 

Dal-Cairbre, 91 
Dal-Cais, 91 



INDEX. 



331 



Dal-Fiatach, 158, 246, 271 

Dal-Riada, 91, 158, 246, 271 

Dalar, 274 

Dal n-Araide, 246, 271 

Daniel, 250 

Dartraighi, 301 

Dartry, 301 

David, 124, 221 

Dawkins, Prof. Boyd, 21 

Decantae, 226, 232, 295 

Deceangli, 81, 235, 292, 295 

Degsastan, 159 

Deinioel, 250 

Deira, 114, 129, 130, 132, 139, 

189, 295 
Deisi, 121, 245, 247, 259 
Delgovicia, 39 

Dcmetse, 81, 86, 123, 219^ 296 
Deorham, 108 
Derventio, 39 
Derwyddon, 70 
Deva, 68, 296 
Devana, 164 
Dicalydones, 94, 166, 226, 297, 

298 
Digoll, 132 
Dincat, 123 
Dineirth, 123 
Dinlle, 325 
Dinoot, 127, 310 
Dinorwig, 308 
Diodorus, 8, 45, 53, 208 
Dion Cassius, 37, 56, 77, 92, 

97 
Diviciacos, 31, 297, 310 
Divico, 297 
Dobunni, 29, 30, 35-38, 42, 

43, n, 256, 297 

Domitian, 90 

Domnall Brecc, 159, 160, 176 

Domnann, Erris, 299 

Domnoveros, 40, 297, 300, •^lo 

Donald, 186, 187 

Donald Ban, 201 



Aovr}Ka\7]Sovios, 167, 297 

Aovi/iov, 219, 299, 320 

draco, 136 

dragon, 136, 139 

drui, 70 

Druidism, 69 

Druids, 70-73 

Drumalban, 157, 160 175,224 

Drumcett, 158 

Drust, 175-177, 180, 181 

Dub, 195 

Dubnovellaunos, 27, 297, 298, 

319 
Dubthach, 74, 75 
Dumbarton, 146 
Dumnogeni, 298 
Dumnonii, 43, 44, 47, 48, 52, 

79, 114, 155, 163, 184, 218, 

223,224,234, 298, 318 
Dumnorix, 40, 58, 65 
Dunawd, 127, 128, 310 
Dunbolg, 283 
Duabrettan, 146 
Duncan, 190-93, 267 
Dungal, 177 
Dunion, 219, 299, 320 
Dunkeld, 165, 181, 182, 183, 

227, 285 
Dun Nechtain, 147, 173 
Durngueir, 109 
Durnovaria, lop 
Durobrivas, 300 
Durocobrivis, 300 
Durolipons, 229, 297, 300 
Durotriges, 19, 43, 44, 52, 219, 

301 
dux, 104, 119 
Dux Britanniarum, 100, 104, 

117, 119, 121, 135-9, 144, 

322 
Dyvnwal Moelmud, 318 
Dyfrdwy, 296, 309 

Eadberht, 178, 183, 186 



332 



CELTIC BRITAIN. 



Eanfrith, 133 

Earn, 269 

Ebudae, 225, 231, 301 

Eburacon, 88 

Eceni, 28, 36-39, 44, 62, 66, 

80, 84, 85, 106, 230, 291, 292, 

301 
Ecgbyrht, 109, 137 
Ecgfrith, 147, 150. 155, 173 
Edgar, 189 
Edgar .Etheling, 200 
Edinburgh, 134, i53 
Edmund, 188, 200 
Edred, 188, 189 
Edwin, no, 129-133, 137-9. 

154 
Eidyn, 304 
Ellmyn, 140 
Elmet, 130, 139 
Elphin, 176 
Elton, Mr., 6, 8, 45, 46 
Emain Macha, 24*) 
Emer, 269, 270 
Emrys, 105, 303 
Eochaid, 176, 185 
Epaticcos, 26, 29, 301 
Epeiacon, 229, 302 
Epidii, 225, 231 
Epidion, 225 
Eppillos, 23, 24, 26, 28, 31, 

33> 302 
Er, 269, 270 
Ere, S 'ns of, 180 
Erin, 66, 75, 268, 305 
Erne, 269 
Ersch, 151 
Eamenius, 240 
Evans, Sir John, 8, 19, 23, 

210 

Fad Felen, Y, 68 
Fdrinmsegl, 108, 138 
Feineachus, 270 
Feini, 269 



Fergus, 176 

Fergus Mac Ercse, 157 

Fethanleag, Faddily, 109 

Ffichti, 242 

Ffinan, 174 

Fiacc, 75 

Fidach, 156 

Finlaig, 196 

Finn, 238 

Finnola, 195 

Fir Bolg, 299 

Fir Uiaid, 246 

flaith, 67 

Flavia Caesar iensis, 99 

Follamhain, O', 289 

Fortrenn, 95, 162, 176, 180, 

182, 194, 195, 199, 224, 322 
Forum Juli, &c., 301 
Four Masters, the, 64. 246, 283 
Frauu, Frome, 109 
Gael, 3 

Gai's Field, 134 
Galeoin, 299 
Gall, 156 
Galli, 2, 270, 302 
Galwadia, 156 
G'.ngani, 235, 292, 3^2 
G irtnait, 169, 173 
Geloni, 54, 245 
Genunia, 90, 91, 273 
Geoffrey, 120, 137, 144, 290, 

316 
Geona Cohors, 01, 273 
Geraint, 109, 237, 303 
Gerontios, 96, 97, 303 
Geryon, 204 
Gildas, 74, 97, 104, 105, 107, 

122, 124, 136, 168, 237, 247, 

258, 294, 324 
Glraldus, 64, 68, 144 
Girg, 185, 194 
Giudi, 152 

Giudi, urbs, 134, 152 
Glannog, 132 



INDEX. 



333 



Glasgow, 199 

Glastonbury, 237 

Goddeu, 156 

Gododin, 114, 118 

Goedeli, 184 

Goidel, 3, ^84, 244, 245 

Golam, 270 

Granpius Mons, 89, 229 

Green, Mr., 108 

Griffith, 64 

Grote, Mr. 65 

Guened, Brit., 321 

Guilou, IC9 

Guitolin, 105 

Gaortepir, 122, 258 

Guricon, Caer, 325 

Gwaun, 121 

gwlad, 67 

gwledig, 104, 105, 107, 121, 

124, 125, 138, 162 
Gvvyddel, 242, 244,245 
Gwynasedd, 279, 280 
Gwyndod, 124, 321 
Gsvynedd, 124, 277, 322 

Haddan and Stcjbbs, 74, 

107, 122, 243, 260 
Hadrian, 90, 247 
Hatfield, 132 
Hathovulf, 290 
Hebrides, 56, 301 
Hefenfelth, 133 
hela, 315 
Helvetii, 58 
Hengist, 97 
Herodian, 242, 312 
Herodotus, 5, 54, 268 
Hethfeld, 132 
Hibernia, 244, 268 
hildr, 2 
Himilco, 47 
Hirend, 269 
Honorius, 96 
Horestii, 95 



Hiibner, Dr., 77,88, 95. 98, 214, 

218, 249, 255, 256, 261. 321 
Handason, 191 
Hussa, 145 

Iago, 126 

Iceni, 36 : see Eceni 

Ictian Port, 14, 303 

Ictian Sea, 206, 303 

Icti?, 45, 303 

Ida, 113 

ler, 269 

Indui^h, 189 

Insubres, 321 

lolo MSS., 119, 123, 125, 254, 

257, 309, 318 
Irische, 151 
Isca, 86, 300 
Isidore, 242 
Isubrigantion, 321 
Isurion, 321 
Ith, 271 
Ithel, 254 
Itius, 14, 303 
ludeu, 134, 152, 15^^, 271 
Iverna, 268, 305 
Ivernii, 268 

Jambres, 71 

Jannes, 71 

Jarla Saga, 191 

Jerome, St., 56, 94 

Joceline, 144 

Johnson's Tour, 309 

Jubainville, M. d'A. de, 280, 
3TO-2 

Julia Augusta, 56 

Julius Cjeoar, 9-23, 27, 28, 
36, 37, 41, 46-63, 73, 76, 
207, 2oe5, 240, 248, 3ir, 

317 
Julius Frontinus, 85 
Jutes, 113, 153 
Juvenal, 210^^ 268, 2S0 



334 



CELTIC BRITAIN. 



Kamber, 144 

Keith Inch, &c., 152, 317 

Kells, 181 

Kemble's Cod. Dip., 293, 310 

Kenneth mac A., 182-186, 

190, 192, 193, 198, 202 
Kent, 18, 19, 22, 25, 28, 35,53 
Kentigern, 145, 146, 174, 199, 

250 
Keredig, 120, 123, 220, 250, 

255, 259 
Kessarogion, 136, 139 

Kilrymont, 179, 187 

Kinneil, 154 

Kinvelin, 318 

Kyle, 118 

Kymro, 140, 281 

Kymry, the, 112, 116, 122, 

124, 145, 281, 321 
Kynan, T07, 143 
Kynddylan, 108 
Kynesii, 268, 277 

Labienus, 22 
Labraid, 299 
Lagin, 299 
Latona, 308 
Leucopibia, 231 
Liger, 205 
Liguria, 205 
Lindon, 161 
LlanfBnap, 174 
Lloegr, 144 
Lludd, 265 
Locrinus, 144 
Loidis, 130, 134, 139 
Loigaire mac Neill, 74 
Lollius Urbicu?, 90 
Lossie, 232 
Loxa, 232 
Lud, 263 
Lugi, 224 
Lugir, Mocu, 74 
Lumphanan, 174, 192 



Mabinogion, "]■}), 230, 282, 

303, 307, 319 
Mabon, 230, 307, 308 
MacCarthy, see Carthach 
Mac Con, 267 
Mac Dechet, 232 
Macbeth, 190-194, 196, 197, 

200, 264, 269, 274 
Maea*ae, 92-95, 158, 164, 166, 

167, 172, 177, 3QK 
MaelbaeaS3, see Maelbeth 
Maelbeth, 196, 267 
Maelchon, 267 
Maelcoluim, see Malcolm 
Maeldav, 125 
Maelgwn,68, 119, 122-125, 128, 

136, 143, 248, 250, 261, 306 
Maelpadraic, 73, 265 
Maelumi, 159, 265 
Magh-Girginn, 159 
Mag-Ithe, 271 
Magi, 69, 71, 74 
Maglocunos, see Maelgwn 
Maid of Norway, 200 
Malcolm, 148, 188-192, 196- 

201 
Manann, 155, 223 
Manaw, 112, 1 18-120, 134, 

143, 155, 223 
Mandubratios, 17, 18, 27, 287 
mapbrith, 212 
Maponi, 230, 308 
Maponos, 230, 308 
maqui, 216 
Margaret, 200, 201 
Maridunon, 300 
Marne, 308 
Mars, 67 

Marseilles, 5-7, 19, 46, 47, 209 
Martial, 210 
Martin, 8 
Maserfelth, 133 
Matrona, 308 
Maxima Cassariensis, 99 



INDEX. 



335 



Maximus, 93, 95, 103, 145, 

259 
Mawddach, 86, 219, 220 

Mearns, the, 159, 187, 194, 

195 
Meiceren, 132 
Meilochon, 267 
Meirion, 120, 125 
Meldi, 14 
Menapii, 22, 49 
Menevia, 153 
Mercia, 106, no 
Mercury, 67 
Merlin, 136 
Mernis, 159 
Mervyn, 143 
meudwy, 73 
Miathi, see Maeafse 
Miati, see Masatse 
Mil, 270, 271 
Milesian, 270 
Milton, 144 
Minerva, 67, 68 
Mocetauc, 147 
Mocu Lugir, 74 
Modron, 308 
Moerne, 159 
Mog-Corb, 266 
Mog-Net, 265 
Mog-Nuadat, 265 
fjLoipa, 90 

Mommsen, Prof., 56, lor, 304 
Mona, 86, 87, 129, 219 
Monarchy of B ., 144 
Moneit, 266 

Moni ludeorum, 153, 231 
Moridunion, 300 
Morini, 9, 10, 22, 49 
Mormaer, 191 
Morvran, 318 
Mounth, 174, 192 
Mowat, M., 59 
mrecht, 211 
Mulpatrick, 265 



Mjnyw, 231 

Myvyrian Arch., 129, 132, 
135, 149 

Naiton, 174 
Narbonne, 5, 46, 47 
Nechtan, i73-i77. i79, i93. 

266 
Nectarides, 105 
Neithon, 174 
Nennius, 97, 104, 105, 118-121, 

131, 133, 134, 237, 257-259, 

271, 325 
Nero, 83 
Net, 265, 272 
Neubauer, Dr., 305 
Niduari, 113, 223 
Nigra, Count, 73 
Ninnian, 173 

Nith, 199, 222, 233, 234, 272 
Nodens, 67, 265, 316 
Notitia Dignitatum, 99, loi, 

230, 235, 248, 320 
Novantas, 222, 223, 235 
Novios, 199, 220 
Nuada, 63, 67, 265 
Nudd, 265 
Nynias, 150, 173 

O'CURRY, 67, 270, 281 
O'Donovan's '* Four Masters,*' 

283 
Ochil Hills, 234 
Octapitaron, 231 
Offa, 142 
Ogam, 216, 252, 253, 26-1, 266, 

324 
Oirir Gaithel, 275 
Oi&in, 238 
OlympiodoruF, 97 
ond, 272 
Ondemone, 272 
Orddwy, Rhyd, 308 
Ordous, 221, 308, 309 



33^ 

Ordovices, 8i, 86, 87, 121, 
219, 220, 249, 251, 255-257, 
277, 308 

Orgetorix, 58, 65 

Orrea, 164 

orthan, 206 

Osric, 132 

Ostorius Scapula, 35, 8C-S3, 98 

Oswald, 133, 138 

Oswine, 133 

Oswiu, 133-135, 141, 142, 
146, 150, 155, 172 

Otadini, 114, 156, 223 

Ovid, 54 
Oi;iAAcVeos3l7 
Owtn, 181 

Padarn, 118, 220, 261 
paraveredus, Lat , 302 
Paris, Matthew, 310 
Paris), 39-41, 62, 221, 230, 309 
Parisii, 14, 39, 3 10 
Pateinup, 118, 220 
Patrick, St., 71, 74, 260 
Patringtor, 39, 230 
Paulinus, 131 
Pausanias, 90, 91 
Peanfahel, 153, i54 
Pecthelm, 150, 313 
Peisrudd, 118 
Pencaitland, 152, 313 
Pencrik, 310 

Penda, no, 132-135, I4T. i55 
Pengwern, ic8, 142 
Penicuick, 153 
Penkridge, 230, 310 
Pennardd, 125 
Pennocrucion, 230, 234, 310 
Pentland, 112,153, 313 
Peohtas, 313 
Peoht-names, 313 
Petilius Cerealis, 85 
Petriarze, 229 
Petroc, 144 



CELTIC BRITAIN. 



Petuaria, 39, 230, 310 

Petueriensis, 230 

Philip II., 19 

Piccardach, 241 

Pictanei, 312 

Pictania, 187, 312 

Plctavi, 244, 311, 312 

Picti, 240, 311, 312 

Pictinia, 187, 312 

Pictus, 93-95 

Pictones, 241, 244, 311 

Pictore.=, 241, 311 

Picts, 112, 115, 120, 147, 152, 
155, 156, 160, 172, 175, 198, 
199, 241, 242, 245, 270 

Pihtes It a, 293 

Pliny, 42, 204, 205, 214 

Pomponious Mela, 41, 205 

Portus Itius, 14 

Posidonius, 8, 45, 219 

Powy?, 142, 257, 277 

Pfsesidium, 229 

Praetorium, 229 

Prasutago?, 84, 230 

UperauLKaL Nyjcrot, 204, 24I 

Procolitia, 229 

Procopiu?, 214 

Prydein, 207, 303 

Prydyn, 207, 242, 303 

Ptolemy, 39, 156, 161, 162, 
164, 166, 199, 222, 226, 230, 
231,234, 269, 273, 282,285, 
296, 316, 317, 320 

Pablius Crassus, 48 

Puffin I., 132 

Pytchley, 293 

Pytheas, 4-8, 42, 209 

R^DWALD, 129 
Ravennas, 308, 320 
Read, C. H., 4, 21, 262, 264 
Reeves, Bishop, 72, 152, 206, 

269, 312 
Rcgni, 24, 43, 79, 106 



INDEX 



337 



Reinach, Salomon, 287, 289 

Remi, 29, 313 

rex, 27, 32, 65, 126 

Rex Brittonum, 137, 143 

Rex Scottorum, 197 

rhian, 66 

Rhodri, 143 

Rhun, 126, 131, 185 

Rhydderch, 145, 146 

Rhygyvarch, 258 

Rhys ab Tewdwr, 143 

Ri, 266, 272 

Ridunio, 300 

rigan, 66 

Ritupise, 231 

rix, 65 

roe, roi, 287 

Roi, 266 

Rutupias, 231 

Saeson, 107 

Saint, 315 

Sais, 233 

Samson, 254 

Sanctus, 259 

Savaddon, 64 

Schiehallion, 165 

Scipio, 5 

scitlivi?si, 254, 313 

ScDtia, 197, 244 

Scott, Sir Walter, 201, 322 

Scotti, 56, 94, 121, 184, 241, 

245, 247, 275 
Scythia, 244 
Segantii, 315 
Ssgeia, 316 

Segontiaci, 17, 28, 29, 315 
Segontion, 315 
Seiont, 315 

Selgovae, 222, 223, 233, 234, 
Selyv, 126 [247, 272, 315 

Sen-Cheneoil, Tuath 281 
Sen-Erann, Tuath, 281 
Senchus Mor, 63, 64, 270 



Senemagli, 317 

Senomagli, 317 

Senotigirnios, 41 316 

Sequani, 216 

Serrigi, 248 

Servus Dei, jz 

Setantii, 222, 223, 315 

Seteia, 222, 316 

Severus, 92, 93, 167 

Sidonius, 54 

Silchester, 24 29, 286 

Silulanus, 316 

Silura, 42, 316 

Silures, 42, 52, 64, 81, 82, 85, 
219, 316 

Silvianus, 316 

Simeon of Durham, 190, 199 

Simon Magus, 71, 74 

Sirigi, 248 

Sith-Chaillinn, 165 

Skene, Dr., 70, 95, ro8, 113, 
175, 225, 227, 269, 294, 311, 
312, 323, 325 

Slamannan, 155 

Smertas, 226 

Solinus, 42, 56, 316 

Spinis, 229 

Stilicho, 95 

Stokes, Dr., 57, 71, 75, 211, 
261, 311, 323 

Stonehenge, 252 

Strabo, 5, 7, 50, 53, 54, 56 

Strageath, 160 

Strathclyde, 148 

Strathearn, 269 

Stuart Glennie, Mr., 238 

Suetonius, 32, 34, 79 

Suetonius Paulinus, 83-85 
I Sulpicius Severu-, 316 
i Sweet, Dr., 138 
I Sylinancis, 316 

\ 

I Table of Dignities, see 

i Notitia 

z 



33^ 



INDEX 



Tacitus, 79, 89, 118, 163, 295, 

317 
Tcexali, 164, 166, 225, 234, 

317 
Tsexalon, 164, 317 
Talargan, 147, 177-181 
Taraea, 164 

Tasciovant, 26, 27, 29, 317 
taxea, 318 
Taximagulus, 317 
Tecuanf, 317 
TeS^icnius, 319 
Tegeingl, 295 
Tegid, 318 
Teilo, 231 
Tenigenonia, 319 
Tenuantius, 317 
Tessignius, 319 
Teviotdale, 149 
Teyrnllwg, 139, 140 
Thanet, 44, 46, 52 
©eoSoopoy, 264, 319 
Theodosius, 94, 95, 235 
Theodric, 146 
Thersites, 64 
Thorfinn, 191, 192 
Thule, 56 
Tiberius, 34 
Timasus, 42, 46 
Tincommios, 23-25, 318 
Tiree, 271 
Titus, 79 

Togodumnos, 35, 77, 319 
Toliapi?, 230 
Toutiorix, 297 
Trenagusu, 317 
Trenegussi, 317 
Trent, 80 
Treveri, 22 

Triads, the, 129, 132, 135, 149 
Trinovantes, 17, 18, 20, 27, 28, 

36, 84, 85, 106, 298, 320 
Tripnun, 258, 259 
Trisantona, 80 



Trucculensis Portus, 89, 320 
Trutulensis Portus, 89, 320 
Tuessis, 164 
Twrch Trwyth, 308 
Tylor, Dr., 8 

Ugaine, 288 

Ulaid, 246 

Ulidians, Ultonian?, Ulster 

Men, 246 
Ungust, 176-181, 266 
Urbagen. 131 
Urien, 145, 257 
Uven, 181 
Uxacona, &c., 234 
Uxama, 282 

Uxelodunon, 234, 247, 320 
Uxella, 234, 320 
Uxellon, 234, 320 

Vacomagi, 163, 165-167, 227, 

234 
Valamni, 289 
Valentia, 94, 99 
Velauni, 289 
Vellaunos, 289 
Vellavnivs, 289 
Vellocatus, 39 
Venedot, 124, 277, 321 
Veneti, 9, 47-51, 321 
Venicones, see Vernicomes, 
Venutios, 39 
Vepogenos, 41 
Vereda, 230, 302, 321 
Vergil, 245 
vergobretos, 59, 322 
Verica, 23, 24 
Verlamion, 26 
Vernicomes, 162, 164, 166, 

167, 225 
VertercB, 322, 324 
Verturiones, 94, 161, 167, 

184, 199, 224, 234, 283, 

322 



INDEX 



339 



Vespasian, "j*]^ 79, 85, 86 
Vexalla, 234 
Vibius Sequester, 205 
Victoria, 161, 323 
Victorina, 284 
Vigfusson, Dr., 69, 191, 296 
Viromandui, 287 
Visurix, 65 
Volisios, 40 
Volusenus, 9, 10 
Vortigern, 97, 136 
Vortiporios, 123, 258, 324 
Votadinj, 114, 156 
Votecorigas, 324 
Vriconion, 80, 232, 324 

Wertermorum, 187, 199 
Werthyr, Y, 323 
Westwood, Prof., 255 
Whitehorne, 150 



Windisch, Prof., 67, 286 
Winged Camp, 164 
Winwsed, 134 
Woden, 291 

Wordsworth, Bishop, 305 
Wrach, Y, 68 
Wredech, 179 
Wrekin, the, 325 
Wroxeter, 80, 325 
Wthol, 181 
Wurgust, 176 
Wyre, 220 

XiPHILINUS, 56 

Ynys Prydain, 207 

ZiMMER, Prof., 56, 71, 314 

Zonaras, 93 
Zosimus, 97 



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